Headlights2014/OnBoarding
Name of idea
W3C Community On-Boarding
Submitter name
Dom Hazael-Massieux
Classification
None of the above
One Hundred Word Description of the Idea
As the scope of Web technologies increases, and as the communities impacted by the Web grows, it becomes critical that a wider variety of people can come on board of the W3C train and become effective participants in W3C groups.
Effective participation in W3C groups require overcoming a number of barriers:
- a cultural/language barrier for some
- understanding how a given group works given the disparity of work modes
- understanding the underlying technical stack
- understanding the most impactful ways to contribute based on one's interests and abilities
In this headlight, we would examine and document all the existing approaches deployed to overcome these barriers, explore new ones, and facilitate the deployment of the most effective ones (e.g. by suggesting or building tools).
Benefit(s) to Web or W3C
Make the Web relevant and adapted to its growing community of stakeholders.
Make W3C more inclusive, make it grow more smoothly, and give it more resources to accomplish its mission.
Which of our stakeholders would be the most enthusiastic in supporting
- new Members
- Chairs and Staff contacts (as they might get access to more contributors)
Some early ideas
- gather stories from successful new participants
- generalize welcome messages to new group participants across groups:
- provide a template of expected information
- have IPP send that information upon joining new groups
- (how to best ensure the info remains up to date?)
- propose to chairs/staff contacts to organize a monthly "welcome teleconference" specifically for new participants (taking timezones into account)
- more generally, train chairs/staff on "community onboarding"?
- create on-line training program for new participants? (is that equivalent to the "modern guide" project?) probably both on technical and more "cultural" aspects
- create a forum/mailing list for participants (new and old) to exchange questions & answers (à la Stack Overflow?)
- institutionalize a "welcome new participants" day before TPACs
look at minutes of related TPAC breakout