We had another fortnightly Fedora Join SIG meeting today. We had decided on the specific goal of the SIG the last time we'd met. In short, we'd established that the SIG would work on setting up and maintaining channels where newbies can communicate with the community before they've begun contributing. We'd leave the tooling to CommOps, who are working on this already. Following up from then, this week we got together to see what tasks we should get on with. The links are here:

• Minutes: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-24/joinsig.2016-10-24-15.03.html
• Minutes (text): https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-24/joinsig.2016-10-24-15.03.txt
• Log: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-3/2016-10-24/joinsig.2016-10-24-15.03.log.html

We began with a discussion of where the SIG needs to be mentioned for us to gain visibility. Of course, this discussion kept returning to tooling - wcidff, wiki pages, the website, and so on. We quickly agreed that we need to first make the SIG more visible within the community so that when we begin to funnel newbies to the channels, we have enough folks to help them out. Only then would it make sense to include our presence on our public facing pages.

So, for the next two weeks, we're working on:

• find a way to get some metrics on the activity of the IRC channel - to see how many of us are there, how many newbies come in, what the most active times are and so on and so forth.

This is partially solved already. I remembered that the IRC support SIG used to have a weekly stats HTML page back in the day. nirik (who knows pretty much everything!) quickly told me that a package called pisg does this and I've started playing with it already. An example stats page is here: https://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/fedora-join-stats/201610.html. There are other alternatives too - superseriousstats for example. I'll tinker with these a bit more to see if we get the stats we need. Neither can be clubbed with FAS, for example. The other tasks are about spreading the word to make the community better aware of the channels:

• announce the SIG on the community blog
• announce the SIG on the announce mailing list

We'll get these out in the next few days. Since you're reading this already, please do hang out in the channels that we've set up. We've already got some newbies trickling in to the IRC channel and sometimes we miss their questions if we're not actively monitoring the channel:

• #fedora-join on Freenode
• The Fedora Join mailing list

If you do run into people that need help getting started, please send them over to one of our channels too.

The next stage of course would be to publicise these channels outside the community, but that's a few weeks away at the moment. That's it for this meeting. Have a good week ahead!