I'm breaking that in later today. So yeah, Neopitos, the stage is yours.
Good. And don't forget this.
Oh, yeah. Give me a second.
Should be working now. Yeah, awesome. So hi, everyone. Thank you for being here
and for joining me in this talk about building culture.
What I wanted to share with you in this talk is basically some insights on how
we can all collectively shape our culture at KDE,
you know, reflect a bit of what we've been doing so far and how we can change
and evolve this going forward and, you know, sustain a strong community within KDE.
I believe this is like a very, very crucial project in terms of the long-term
success of KDE, both as a community and our projects.
So a bit about myself before we dive in. My name is Nefidos Kolokotronis.
In my day job, I work at CCG.
It stands for Core Engineering Consulting Group. It's specifically a platform
engineering company, and there I'm responsible for our community offering.
I've been a KDE contributor for nearly eight years now, contributing mostly
to community and organizational stuff.
You can see there I've been, nowadays I'm part of the community working group.
I've been in the board of directors of some other working groups,
and I've also been a gold champion in one of the first rounds regarding streamlined onboarding.
This is actually my seventh academy and each
year I'm very very amazed by how much
both as individuals and as a community have to gain from gathering
here together and I think particularly when viewed through the culture building
let's say perspective academy is like a very essential and irreplaceable cornerstone
for our community and for creating shared experiences here so again a big thank
you to the organizers and for making this happen and for you to be here.
So what is culture like to get started in the topic?
In the context of our community, culture is a collective set of all the things
you see there in that box.
So the knowledge we have, the norms that we share, the beliefs,
the rules, our behavior, it's all the things that in a way guide how we interact with each other.
And you could say that all together for this is magic glue that holds us together
and it guides how we interact with each other, how we collaborate,
how we communicate and how we make decisions as well.
It's a deeply social process culture, and this emerges kind of naturally through
our interactions as we engage with the people around us.
There are ways, of course, to improve it and, you know, enact it and reinforce
it, but this grows naturally.
So, according to Wikipedia, to go through some definitions, the way we acquire
culture is by the process of of enculturation and socialization.
In simple terms, this means that by being exposed and adopting knowledge and
norms and customs from other communities, from other people around us,
from other teams and people we interact with.
And as Phoebe points out, it's one of my go-to community building consultancies.
If you're into that, check them out.
They emphasize that like a lot of things that are related to our behavior,
culture is something that we can reinforce. We can point out the good things,
reinforce them and build on top of that.
So let's think of culture as the environment we create all together and that
we maintain together and we should be responsible about evolving it.
Every interaction we have could potentially be contributing to how our culture
is being formed going forward.
And this is what makes culture like a living, breathing organism that grows
with all of us and our community all together.
So, culture is very important, I believe, because it impacts every way,
like most of the things that we do and how we operate in KDN,
in every organization, every community.
Are we supportive? Are we respectful? Are we open-minded?
These are things that are behaviors that are driven by our culture,
our values, and the norms that we have established between us.
It also affects how we communicate with each other, both internally and also
externally, with our users, with our community.
So we use all these platforms, matrix, developer tools, the mailing list, our forum.
So the tone and style of this communication is affected by the culture that
we have and should actually reflect our underlying culture.
Another important role that culture plays is on how we make decisions.
Do we discuss before acting? How do we develop code together?
Do we invite input from other team members? Do we involve people?
So a welcoming, inclusive culture invites participation and in that way,
it nurtures long-time engagement.
Finally, our culture also influences how we interact with other organizations.
And it's not something that affects us internally.
So maybe are we open to collaborations?
Do we want to join larger groups that are similar to what we are doing?
Do we want to form new partnerships, new synergies with people?
This is part of our culture. This is part of how we approach this kind of situations.
So, KDE's culture is not something that happened by accident.
It naturally evolves, but we guided it and we provided the means to do that.
So you can see here, I gathered some of the foundational documents and some
practices and initiatives that I feel they act as our cultural framework.
They are in a historical timeline, so from the one that was first to the one that was more recent.
And I find it interesting that to also note when these were last modified to
see that there are actual people that still care about them and they try to
update them and continue to make them, they put in effort to make them relevant.
Quick question. Is there anyone here that knows about the existence of all these
six documents or initiatives?
I have Lydia only.
Volker as well. Okay. I'd assume that most of you know at least four,
like the big ones, let's say, like our code of contact, our manifesto,
the vision and the goals.
Is there anyone that has never heard of any of this?
Oh, that's good. At least we're aware of most of them.
So let's quickly go over them to see what each one is supposed to be doing for
our culture and how they impact us.
So the code of contact, it was actually created 12 years after the community
was started, if my math was correct.
And it's when we decided to make this code of contact an unofficial thing.
And it's a good thing. It's a great sign of a community that is maturing,
that is caring about its members, that it wants to have some guidelines of how
we interact and how we do things together.
So it's of critical significance.
And it's very important that this document came out first
because it gave us like a way to see
how we treat each other and how we ensure
that our community remains a safe space a welcoming
environment so we can build on top of that then came the asking questions uh
wiki initiative i was actually not aware of this before doing this uh the research
for this talk and but it's uh you can see i was pleasantly surprised to see
that it was still updated like a year ago and this it's it looks a bit outwards.
It looks at newcomers and how we expect people to reach out to us,
ask us questions, and in general, how we interact with people that are new to our community.
And then came the KDE Manifesto, of course, another key cultural initiative, we could say.
It more or less outlined our key values, and it provided like a compass,
a very, very high-level level compass of how we want to operate internally.
Um, and then moving closer to more recent times, you could say our vision and
mission statements that were published,
uh, like eight years ago, these are like touchstones that they should be reminding
us about our long-term objectives, the principle we aim to uphold.
And they came in a way to be complementary to our manifesto.
Now, soon after the Goals Initiative was introduced, it helped the community
at large to focus maybe on bigger things, on particular topics that we want
to work on and improve upon over a couple of years usually.
Just yesterday you must have probably heard about the new initiative,
I think it's the fourth round this year.
So it's great to see that this initiative is still fruitful,
it's still productive, and it shapes the way we want to move forward.
And I was happy to see that one of the three goals that was elected is related
to what we're talking today here about, you know, the culture and bringing in
more people and how we do that.
Now, finally, another entry that I wasn't aware of when I was before doing this,
the research for this talk is a kiddie culture wiki entry. It's a very recent one.
And it's according to the wiki itself, it highlights some cultural conventions
that have emerged over time in KDE.
Per the way, these are not formal rules, it's just something,
I think Nate was the one that initiated this one.
It's like norms and guidelines about how to interact again with people in KDE.
So there are a couple of things that were uncovered in other documents and people
felt that they should put them here.
So all these documents, all these initiatives, what they're basically doing
is forming and shaping the backbone of our community, of our culture and helping us.
We should use them as reference points, right? When we come across challenges,
we want to make some big decision, this is where we should be going back to
understand our core values, our principles, how we want to operate.
They should be like our point of reference.
Maintaining a strong culture within any organization, any community,
like it's many, many, many ways and balancing acts.
And this is not only difficult, but it also requires ongoing effort from everyone in the community.
And the main challenge we need to address is change.
Change is both internal and external, right? Our community is 28 years now.
So it has evolved a lot. but its consistency has changed. Members come, members go.
The community itself changes in the way we have evolved over the years,
what we think is important, what not.
So we have also the structure of community changes, new groups, new initiatives.
So all these things evolve and they change the community internally.
At the same time, we have external factors, social things, political factors that come into place.
Like we have technologies, new technologies that bring in new norms,
new practices, and the expectations of our users, their needs also change through the years.
So we are consistently being asked to, on one hand, to remain true to our defining
values, let's say, to being anchored to all the documents that we shared earlier
and the principles, our foundational principles.
And then on the other hand, we need to find ways to evolve, to reinvent ourselves,
to grow our culture, to make a sustainable culture. And this demands adaptation.
This demands evolution of our community.
So what I would say that this means that from time to time, it's important to
go back and look at our culture, go look at other documents and ask ourselves
whether the documents we have, our principles, they still serve our community.
And they align with our goals and where we continue to go, we want to go.
Just to share a simple example of change, like let's pick, I think it's in the
context as well, like a core value is being kind of polite to each other,
which I think at its core, it's easy to understand for everyone,
but you can easily imagine that enacting being kind and polite has changed.
What we mean by being polite is probably not the same, and it's not acted in
the same way that it was acted 30 years ago or 60 years ago.
So in practice, this changes and evolves.
And this is the challenge for us. Is this change reflected in these documents?
Can we go back and maybe we should be refreshing them or updating them to make
them more relevant and keep them updated?
So this is all about finding that sweet spot between growing and embracing new
ideas and new perspectives without losing sight of what this KDE,
what our principles are, and what makes us then unique as a community.
It's not an easy task, but I could summarize like the way we can approach it.
Maybe we can summarize it in like four words, discuss, reflect,
nurture, and reinforce.
Discuss ideas, I would say, reflect on experiences from our members,
nurture relationships and try to reinforce behaviors and values that are very important to us.
We will dive a bit more in the next slides on strategies on how we can do that.
Now, one of the most critical things of building and sustaining a strong culture is onboarding.
When a well-structured onboarding process shouldn't be just introducing the
new members to our processes and our tools,
it should also be about putting effort into integrating new members of our community
into our values and embedding them into our culture and into our community.
Bending is usually it's obviously the first and most often one of the most influential
experiences that new contributors will have And it kind of sets the tone of
their future participation,
I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of you
can probably recall their first experiences when joining the
KDE What was their entry point who they
were talking to and you know It's probably the same in other communities because
I guess most of you are also parts of other communities So I hope that you remember
the impact this had on your own perception about the community and the impact
Like how it affected you so you're still here and you're still contributing,
So you can see why onboarding is so important and why it fits straight into culture.
So effective onboarding and doesn't only help though new contributors like a
big part of like talking to these contributors and making the transition and
their being embedded into our community more smooth,
means that we also strengthen the overlap community because we
ensure that everyone is aligned like a more senior person within our community
is now aligned with a new person because they have they share the same values
they share their same principles so you can understand how this helps in you
know um it basically means less friction between new members and less frustration
between new and older members.
But as I said in the title of this presentation, when viewed from the cultural
perspective, onboarding shouldn't end in those first one, two months,
one or two weeks, depending on how you see it.
It should be an ongoing support, an ongoing engagement, and a key way to reinforce
these cultural values to ensure at least long-term participation.
So going into how we can sustain a strong culture, I split it into three pillars
that made sense to me when I was preparing this talk, starting from participation and ownership.
Good intentions are good, we mean well, we do the documents,
but everyone needs to be active in our community.
And when engaging with others, it's required to put active effort to enact this culture.
And in the end, we should all be aiming at becoming like we have the gold champions.
I don't know, maybe we can have cultural champions in a way.
So we should all be aiming at being that. you know, and then it's like feedback and reflections.
These are tools that are very, very important. We're talking about sustainability.
We want to evolve. We want to grow.
So we need to ensure that what we do and the way we do it, it's like it reflects
and it stays in tune with all the new members in our community,
with our community in general, and how it has evolved.
And to do that, We need to make sure that you know, all the voices are heard
that people come in with new ideas We we stop we listen we major we reflect
and we make adjustments as needed,
Uh, therefore the third point is about enacting and enforcing We have the guidelines.
This is a must we have the reference documentation to point people at but um.
Part like These things could easily remain theoretical if we're not acting on
them them, then they are just there and they're not helping us in a way.
We need to be going back to them. We need to be applying them consistently.
We need to have ways to reinforce them. Because without active moderation,
unfortunately, even the strongest communities, if they remain,
without moderation, it means people will come in, the loudest voices will be
the ones driving change.
And this is not necessarily what you want to do here. You need to build an inclusive environment.
You need to protect people that want to share their opinions.
So, even the stronger cultures without enforcement, they tend to fail in the long term.
Now, we talked about change and how important it is in this balancing act between
being true to our values and evolving.
And these are some mechanisms that help us for embracing change and adopting
to new developments. And this is vital.
At the heart of this process is being welcoming to new ideas and willing to
adapt and evolve our culture and our practices.
But we should always consider what we'll adopt and how we'll adopt it should
come back to our values and our principles.
We should make sure that it's in alignment and in accordance with that.
Otherwise, we're just picking up stuff from other communities and things we
see around them and bringing them inside without thinking how we integrate them based on our values.
Now, we talk a lot about diversity by allowing variations, you know,
different viewpoints, learning from each other and experiences,
new suggestions that people have.
We create an environment that allows for creativity. As new people come in,
they bring in new ideas, they bring in new energy.
We see that a lot from various initiatives that we have.
And this openness, let's say, to new perspectives is a very,
very important aspect for a community need to grow, to feel relevant,
to remain relevant, to respond to all the needs of our community members.
And at the same time, relationships, they are very, very important within our community.
It's important to build trust-based collaboration among us and within the community.
We can probably, if you are skillful enough individually, you might be able
in a position to achieve a lot.
But if you want to play the long-term game, you need people around you,
you need the skills of other people, you want the support of teams and groups around you.
Now some key challenges for this effort.
The first one, at least one that I feel is very, very important and I've seen
it in many communities have been involved, is apathy and overcoming it.
So without active participation, I keep going back to that because this is,
I believe, very important and acting this, our culture,
it's very, very difficult to maintain momentum if we are apathetic,
you know, and then there's a risk of stagnation, that that community remains
at something and it never evolves.
And it will inevitably cause and lead into a disconnection between our values
in the way we define them in the documents when we sat down and thought about
this and our mission and our vision and what we do in our everyday practice.
And there will be a misconnection. And this will inevitably cause conflicts and frustrations.
Another key challenge is navigating difficult topics. These are often like sensitivity
issues that they do require some more careful handling.
We want to avoid divisions. We want to avoid conflicts within the community.
I think we have in the past come across such topics. Sometimes we handle them
well. Sometimes we handle with ways that could have improved.
Again, it's important to go back, reflect, and improve. It's always a difficult challenge.
Now, toxicity, negativity, trolling, a lot of behaviors that I'm sure everyone has experienced.
Experience in communities, all these are, they basically like deter participation
and they at all trust and we should be shutting them down as they come.
This shouldn't be an option even for anyone in our community,
right? They should realize that this is not acceptable.
It's not a behavior we allow here because many things could go negative.
Bridging communication gaps, also a very, very important topic.
Misunderstandings can easily arise between us. They can lead to conflict.
They can lead to frustration.
Being mindful of how we explain among us, it's a key to helping us here,
which is not always easy to do when there are heated discussions,
when we feel strongly about a topic, when it's something that we've been working
on and we need to receive criticism on that.
And then the final challenge is that of moderation.
Do we over-moderate or do we do inefficient moderation?
Both have their negatives, right? Over-moderating means that we are suppressing free expression.
We need to be careful not to balance between free expression and ensuring that
the conversation remains civil, respectful, and productive.
Otherwise, it will give room to disruption and tension within the community.
So again, not an easy thing to balance.
In the community, in the working room, we also have this issue a lot.
We make a decision and we will always have someone complain about the decision
we made because they see it from a different perspective on this balance, on this game.
Some feel like you are too strict there, some feel that you should be stricter
there. And no matter what we do on this scale, there will always be people that complain.
Now I talked about the challenges. The last part of my talk is about strategies
that we can say that they can help us going forward.
I split them like in four major categories.
The first one is about setting expectations and accountability within our community.
So while I was going through this list, I kept thinking maybe you can try doing the same.
Do we do this in KDE? And if we do it, do we do it well?
Is there room for improvement? Maybe maybe some things we tried them and they
didn't work out, maybe some things we're not doing at all, and maybe someone
here could lead that effort in helping us improve our culture.
So let's quickly go through them.
So first of all, setting expectations. I think this is something you could say we're doing well.
We have all this documentation about our values, our principles, our code of conduct.
So I feel like this is important. It's not like we need a ton of work there,
on what we are doing. At the same time, what we are not doing very well,
and this is apparent also by the work of the community working group,
is the consequences for violation.
People know what they shouldn't be doing, but when they do what they shouldn't
be doing, they don't know what the repercussions of that will be.
So nobody knows how, I don't want to say punished, but how we react in cases
where people go and they have their own behavior based on our code of conduct.
So, this is not currently documented at all.
And even though we more or less know what we can do and how we can react,
we should be documenting this and making it more transparent to everyone so they know.
This is important both for stopping the violence, let's say,
but also for our community to feel like we are consistent, we are fair,
we're efficient in the way we approach things.
Then we have guidelines for escalation. We are also missing those,
like if an issue arises, it should be clear what the process is of how it would
be handled and how it would be resolved.
And this is not currently, again, something that we're doing. We're working on it.
We noticed this early, at least in the new, I could say that community working
group, we have new members over the last two years. and we feel this is again
an important aspect of it.
And then there's consistency in making decisions, whether it's moderation on
the forum or some, I don't know, rights that we're removing from some developer that is misbehaving.
We should be consistent on how we react.
We should be explaining to people why we're doing this voice to this,
both to the people that are affected, but also to the rest of the community,
which is currently something that we're not very transparent about, I feel.
And of course, all this should be guided by the documents and our policies and all that.
Now, moving into another set of strategies that are more about empowering our
community and supporting our community to be better at enacting our culture.
I think in terms of capacity building, we have tried it in the past,
particularly at Academy.
I don't know if there's training this year. I don't recall if we actually booked something. thing.
But I remember being part of some training and in terms of communication and
social skills, things that are relevant to cultural building,
let's say, I also know that the that they, they be the board of directors also
reached out to the community working group offering some training in terms of,
you know, the people within the community working group to learn and,
you know, gain the skills on how we could be better at what we do.
I don't think we ever acted upon that.
Hopefully fully we will in the future because it's not enough to have guidelines,
but we should ensure that the people responsible for enforcing them are well prepared.
They know how to do that. They have the tools, but they know how to use them.
I talked a lot about the community working group and active community working group is key here.
In my personal opinion, we should be doing much more than just policing the
community, which is more or less what we're doing now.
I feel, provided we have the resources and the availability,
we should be much more active in supporting and nurturing the community,
nurturing our culture, helping the community evolve.
We are now limited to policing and even that we're not doing it very well in
terms of we don't have enough time.
Now we talked already about zero-tolerance-to-toxic behavior.
I think this is easy to understand.
Maybe we should be doing more, as I mentioned earlier, on defining the processes
and sharing them with our community, but overall I don't think we have so many
cases of this within our community.
And then developing Developing clear, accessible methods that help our people
resolve conflicts is also important.
I'm thinking here like how-to guides for people that have issues.
Like an algorithm, when this happens, do this. We don't have these instructions for our community.
So they're more or less left on their own when they come across an issue or
a misbehaving people, person, they need to decide that time what to do and they'd
have nowhere to look to, right? Right.
Um, people do reach out. And if you've seen the reports yesterday,
we had like a lot more, uh, complaints this year in the community working group.
I feel that that's a success because now we're open and people feel like they can, they can come to us.
But again, we should be empowering them to also to handle this.
Third big category is like fostering positive engagement and collaboration. Sorry.
Now, one thing we should all be remembering is that it's not enough to just
complain when someone misbehaves.
I think we're not doing enough of actually giving people kudos when they are
doing well, when they are like the cultural champions I mentioned earlier.
We like to point at the people that are misbehaving. We rarely say,
hey, this person is like very, very good with newcomers.
This person is very good whenever collaborating with. We do that maybe through
the awards out here at Academy from time to time.
I think there's a relevant category, but in general, I don't think we're very
good at pointing out the people that are doing really well.
Another key thing is leading by example. This is particularly important for
people that are in positions that, you know, either they are more senior members
maybe of their community, so junior members look up to them,
or they're engaging much more with our community.
We have people in positions that actually interact with new members or our community
in general much more often than others.
And these people are the ones that should be leading by example, right?
Every interaction with you, that person who is like the most senior,
let's say, or someone who is interacting with the community is an opportunity
for the new members to learn.
It's an opportunity for them to adopt and understand something more about our culture.
And then what I think we've been doing very well is creating opportunities for collaboration.
We have many ways to collaborate, and we do it also in person a lot.
We participate in programs like the Google Summer of Code and the Summer of
KDE, where we bring more senior members of our community with newcomers within our community.
We have sprints. The board in their report yesterday also talked about,
we should be doing more. There are resources.
If you have ideas, you are part in a team that wants to do more,
or go ask for those resources.
And we are here, of course, at Academy, which is the highlight of this effort.
So the more our community comes together, the better it is for the health of our culture.
Finally, it's important to gain the skills of reflecting before acting.
Like, we still see people that go in interactions that become personal,
and they add fuel to that fire.
And, like, after all these years, people still don't know how to manage that.
And we should be trying more to keep discussions constructive and like focusing
or resolving the issue and not making them personal.
But it's true that, you know, the internet, things will get there.
Things will get personal, things will get overwhelming.
And what I would advise is just disengage, like close the laptop,
close what you're doing, go take a breath and try to calm down and seek support
from other contributors.
Like like talk it through with someone else. Make sure you're on the right side
of things. Make sure you're not doing yourself something wrong.
Reach out to the community working group. We try to be responsive,
which we might not always do it in the way we like, but we are there and we
are very happy to actually receive more and more of these requests.
So again, don't just come to complain, but also come for support.
We can help you if you don't know how to respond to someone,
if you are having issues, if you think you yourself will misbehave when you're
talking to someone with misbehaving.
So by doing that, we obviously are
maintaining a respectful and supportive environment that helps everyone.
Now, the fourth, let's say, big group of strategies, it's about continuous improvement,
continuous adaptation and moving forward. I talked a lot about this.
Feedback, again, it's very, very important.
We should be regularly gathering feedback from our community and particularly
in regards to our culture, our practices, that will help us understand our current
status and then consider what we need to adjust to move forward.
So, There are various ways to do that.
In KDE, we tend to gather feedback by talking to each other.
We come here to the academy, I talk to three people, then I would pick up something
that someone said and go talk to someone that's more relevant regarding that.
And this is how we communicate feedback between us.
We can probably do better than that in having more systematic ways of gathering
feedback, whether that is some polls or whether that is, I don't know,
some surveys that we do from time to time, just to make sure that,
as we mentioned earlier, our community is changing.
Are we receiving that feedback? What is the change that is happening?
How is the demands? How are the needs of the community? And how do they change?
I've already talked about encouraging inclusive participation.
I think we have many initiatives on that front.
It should be better for the people that don't feel they're included to be talking about that.
So I don't want to go and say we're doing it well, because I feel like people
here will strongly believe that we could be doing better.
So better feedback. Again, we need to be asking people if they feel we're doing
this well, not just deciding by ourselves.
So again, we come back to why feedback is very, very important.
Our goals, also, I come back to them. It's a great way to onboard new people, new ideas.
I know that firsthand because I was part of the first round of goals,
and that's how I was lured in to KDE, actually.
And a big part of why I stayed, we're talking about onboarding as well,
is how the first people, when I joined the community, treated me.
Me, how the first people I interacted with engaged with me. And I felt welcomed.
I felt like I had people to reach out to. I felt like I was,
these people kept reminding me that my contributions are important.
Go, do things, like join the community and push it forward.
Five minutes, right?
Yeah, okay. Two? Okay. I'm wrapping up.
So this is why I strongly believe that our culture is key for more and more
people to feel that feeling, which is very, very nice to feel like when you're
joining a new community.
And we want to pass that, like the KD magic, let's say, on.
We want new people to come in and then bring other people in and make more people
feel that, like our culture.
So, wrapping up here, I would like to urge you to all become cultural champions.
We all need to take more ownership of our collective environment.
We need to build it together in order to maintain the community and our culture
healthy and evolving at the same time.
So, please try to remember that all of our actions in the end shape our culture and our community.
All our interactions matter. And it's a lot of little things that they add together
to form, let's say, these things that we're talking about and we refer to as culture.
If you have new ideas, new initiative on how to improve it, lead that.
We have ways, we have the goals, we have other things that you can gather people
around that and you can improve.
And to consider joining the community working group. It's a core support mechanism.
We could be doing more. So if you have the time and you feel like you have the
skills, join us and help us do more there. And yeah, let's work together to
make KDE, you know, a vibrant and welcoming community with a strong culture
over the years. Thank you.
So we have time for questions. Okay. I actually have a question or a comment
that's burning in me, but I'll give it first, Albert, and maybe we can talk afterwards.
So, yeah, I definitely agree. We need a bit more, even on the onboarding side,
a bit more of guidelines.
I happen to, like, review lots of people's new patches.
And, like, I never know how to encourage them to actually join the community,
right? Like, they send a patch.
Cool. And I merge it and I say, yay, welcome, blah, blah, blah.
And then they send another patch. But like there's this step from the guy has
sent five patches to the how do I make them ask for an account, right?
And there's no guideline on that, right? And for some people,
we do it with five patches.
Some other people, they send 100 patches and we've never asked them to become part of the community.
And something similar happens with the EV part, right? We have no guidelines on that.
And always people say, oh, why is this person not part of the committee?
Because nobody asked for it.
Because we don't have a guideline for it. Should they be involved for five years?
Should they be involved for five months? I mean, I know there's not a set into
stone answer, but I feel like having a guideline on those is like, what do we feel?
So I could go and say, okay, this person has sent one patch.
Obviously not, right? But then I've said 20, if the guideline says 20,
like, oh, well, maybe I can, like, when do I start gauging the I should tell
them they should take the next step, right? Because, like, that's the thing.
Like, we want them to be part of the community, and I have no idea myself when
I should tell them to make the next step, and I don't think we have a guideline
on that, so I would really, really appreciate,
some kind of guideline on that.
Like, I'm not an answer, not a question, sorry, but what's your opinion on that?
My quick answer would be like from the first contribution, you should be treating
them like possible newcomers to our community and like pushing them to do more,
like again, and re-enhancing the positive back. Hey, this is a great patch, as you mentioned.
This is already doing a lot for that person that reached out.
Because remember that that first step is not always easy.
It's like joining a group where everyone knows each other and you're the one
that's just the new guy there.
So it's very, very important, even that first approach. Let's start from that.
But I definitely agree that we don't have this process sorted out in some sort of guide.
It's a, what if, when this happens, do that kind of way. And we could be doing more there.
Now, drawing lines, like at the fifth patch, we consider it a personal part of the community.
Or in the 20th patch, obviously, it is something that happens naturally.
Early and I wouldn't draw lines there.
I had Joe, you wanted to ask something.
A follow up to that. And then I do have a comment. Um, we actually were just
talking about this earlier at lunch and it might be nice to have some sort of, um.
A PDF that says, you're now part
of the KDE community that you send to someone by email or put into, uh,
you know, the somewhere that's visible to them as just a, like,
you're now one of us, because I think a lot of people do contribute,
not thinking I'm now a part of this community, you know, they are,
um, and having some sort of official statement.
My comment was, is I think personally, I've thought about some of this,
um, in a different context.
And I think some of this falls under the purview of the community working group,
in my opinion, in the charge to be proactive in maintaining community health.
And I think it would be nice if there were a way to move beyond just an informal.
Undefined onboarding team to something that is perhaps more formalized,
perhaps even a training for people who onboard and give some structure to that.
Because I think it is such an important part of building the community
and maintaining the community health is establishing the, as you said,
expectations at the onset and giving the necessary information about what people
need to know when they start. It's just a comment. It's not a question.
Like to add to that, I think in the past while I was writing the onboarding,
there was a discussion about doing a WorldCat team,
which ended up having a WorldCat chat on Matrix where I still see a lot of people
joining there when it's their first entry to our community and it's active and I'm happy about that.
And I don't recall who I was talking to the other day in the host.
There's discussion from what I know about building the Go Welcome team again,
like in a more official way. So we have like a process of that.
And going back to the Eric comment, I totally agree,
like joining other communities from time to time, it happened to us that after
like three weeks from my first contribution, I received something like in the
mail, and it was just a sticker or something saying, thank you for your contribution.
It had my name on it. And it's something that I keep like on,
you know, And I cherish that.
And there were little things, but they matter in the end, like if they add up,
you know, and it's important.
SPEAKER 1- Psychologically, it makes you a part of the community in a way that
you weren't . FELIPE HOFFA- It's your first impression, right?
And it's like a feel-good thing.
Thank you.