%% Bitesized bugs are not enough. %% community engagement -- Remember, the end goal is for these people to become part of your project's community. %% -- And communities are made of people. Sometimes we forget that. The point of all these things we make and build for our project infrastructures, all these thing we try to do to make it easier for newcomers to participate %% BOREDOM IS EVIL -- Engineers are taught to make things efficient. Automate everything we can. %% -- Automate out the people. %% GET HELP FASTER %% FIND TASKS FASTER %% SEE PRIOR WORK FASTER %% ANSWER YOUR OWN QUESTIONS FASTER %% -- We're trying to get them up to speed so they can talk with us and work with us. The key words there being "with us." %% -- But it doesn't look that way to them sometimes. %% WE WILL NOT TALK WITH YOU UNTIL YOU LEARN THIS STRANGE NEW TOOL %% STOP ASKING ME WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP AND GO AWAY %% AWAY TO A DOCUMENT NOBODY ELSE HAS TOUCHED FOR MONTHS %% RTFM %% -- I don't think that's the message we're trying to send. %% YOU'RE BORING, STOP TALKING WITH US %% LET'S HELP YOU GET THROUGH THE BORING STUFF SO YOU CAN TALK WITH US! %% -- Why the difference in perception? %% -- There's something in educational psychology called the Dreyfuss model. I won't go into it in great detail right now - you can look up the Wikipedia article for that - but the basic idea is that as we go from novices to experts in a domain - say, FOSS contribution - we think differently about that domain. %% -- The important part is that when we move from one way of thinking to another, we forget what it's like to think the other ways. We forget, sometimes, that other ways of thinking even exist. %% -- Think of learning to cook. When you first learn to cook, you need a recipie; you don't have context, you need to be told exactly how many eggs to put in, and how to measure flour, and how to hold a knife. %% -- When you get good at cooking, you can open your pantry and know how the ingredients would work together; you can improvise your way through making something unexpected and tasty. You know your tools. %% CLARITY CONSTRAINT FREEDOM FRUSTRATION -- Things that look repetitive to us are novel to them. %% THIS IS A GOOD THING -- How can we take advantage of that? %% -- When we make tools or articulate bite-sized bugs, let's make it clear that we're trying to get to deeper conversation faster, not avoid it. Bite-sized bugs help you build more community scaffolding around helping new participants - it doesn't mean you need fewer people working on it, it means you need more people but that they can %% -- That we want people to stand on their own as quickly as possible not so that they'll stop bothering us, but because we want them to bring their own ideas and their own selves to our project. %% -- Not just to blindly follow what we're doing. %% -- Bite-sized bugs help you build more community scaffolding around helping new participants - it doesn't mean you need fewer people working on it, it means you need more people but that they can answer questions more quickly, help new contributors go deeper. %% -- I'm a musician. When I listen to the great jazz pianists play a standard, I know the point isn't that I'm going to play the song exactly like Art Tatum of Charlie Peterson or Thelonius Monk did - I know the point is that I learn from what they did and make my own own improvisations. %% -- What if we presented bite-sized bugs explicitly as "this is how an experienced contributor would look at the problem, and we are trying to teach you how they think - so you can make your own improvisations"?