Identify interest areas for getting involved landing page

Hi Gus - It would be helpful if you could propose some specific additions/changes here! Seems like a good idea to add some "why" to the "how".

Gus, the copy in the first column of http://drupal.org/getting-involved is pulled directly from the summary section of http://drupal.org/node/281873.

I agree some "why" would be useful.

The simplest thing would be for a docs admin to move the "Why get involved?" section to the summary of the node. But this will make the page quite a bit longer. Gus, if you had some suggestions for how to edit http://drupal.org/node/281873 so that the why is shortened, that might be good too.

Also, I've added "Guide" to the title and a path.
http://drupal.org/getting-involved-guide

It looks as if the 'why' is on the main page, but I think the 'Ways to get involved' page is much more important to attract more contributors. Don't make them think, just put the info they need in front of them.

I recommend making the content 'Ways to get involved' part of the main page (using a 2 column layout), to help new contributors quickly get to where they need to go.

And the Why is important but we have to take the itme to make copy more concise without losing meaning.

Attached is a quick mockup of a revision to the existing Getting Involved. If there's no comments, I can make the changes in code.

The first column will list areas that people can contribute to, with lists of relevant skills. This is an attempt to help people identify an area where they can help, since newcomers often don't know.

Skill areas are :

* Writing and editing (in English)
* PHP development / LAMP
* Project management
* Design and UX
* Information architecture
* Theming
* Translating

This page can be the parent page of the Getting Involved Guide.

I'll replace the static "Ways to Get Involved" with a static "Why" with the quote from Dries.

Also, I think http://drupal.org/contribute is somewhat redundant if we're going to display this information on the /getting-involved *and* /getting-involved-guide.

The Getting Involved Guide has a lot of 2nd level pages and I wonder if it makes sense to consolidate them somehow.

aaaaaand mockup (of http://drupal.org/getting-involved)

Of the skill areas you mentioned, you didn't mention support/mentoring. That is an actual skill and an area some people might feel comfortable in, so, might be good as a top level area. We also have good existing guide for that.

People love to see people's face. Eyes are like tiny magnets.

Would be good if we could get pictures:
Community spotlight: Show the image of the person being featured.
Ways to get involved: photo from codesprint. People intensely working together. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceardach/4550838283/in/photostream
Why get involved: Show someone speaking to someone else. http://www.flickr.com/photos/49554039@N06/5149730724/

Some examples:
Ceardach pics are cc licensed. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceardach/4550838283/in/photostream/ - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceardach/4551272696/
Plenty of others, but would require asking for perms, http://www.flickr.com/photos/49554039@N06/5149730724/

Thanks Heather, totally agree on photos; also mentioned on that other post revising Community and Support that I started on Groups. Since some of the Getting Involved content will prob appear on the landing page, do we want to discuss there?

Also yeah, the list is far from complete. .. in addition to support/mentoring, there's event organizing/hosting a sprint, advocacy/marketing, teaching/presenting. And blogging. :) And sponsoring!

Somehow we've got to find a way for people to identify themselves, then show them ways they can get involved. Like matchmaking. But not complicated. Hmm.

Evangelizing - this could be

• blogging (yes Lisa!) - once you have shown your (or your company's blog) to be on topic, submit your feed to the Webmasters Issue Queue for inclusion on the Planet.
• social media sharing to promote projects, events, etc
• Go to meetups OUTSIDE the Drupal community
• Join the Drupal Association as an individual or Company - display your badge on your website!
• Find volunteers for events and volunteer yourself(you don't need to be the organizer of a camp or con to participate!)

How's this for a list of "Interest Areas"? We can eventually provide examples of each inside the Getting Involved sections.

Marketing & promotion
Outreach/advocacy
Event organizing
Event volunteering
Blogging
Documentation (technical writing)
Project management
Design and UX
Information architecture
Theming
Translating
PHP development / LAMP
Support
Mentoring
Presenting
Training
Sponsoring
Hosting sprints
Donations

Looks comprehensive!

Let's see if we can whittle down to fewer, bigger chunks.

I also like the way Ubuntu chunks developer, technical from non-technical. What do you think about this?

Uploaded with Skitch!

Non -technical

Donations and Sponsoring
Blogging, marketing & promotion
Outreach, advocacy
Event organizing and volunteering, hosting sprints
Project management

Technical

Presenting and Training
Mentoring and Support
Documentation (technical writing)
Translating
Design and UX
Information architecture

Developer

Theming
PHP development / LAMP

The Ubuntu example is great. I like how 'Donate' is a separate thing, because many organizations have money but not time.

What's is a better label for it though? "Financial contributions" ?
Money is used for D.A. membership, sponsoring camps/cons, hosting sprints & meetups, donations to D.A., coder lounges etc.
Seriously, get people in a room for 6 hours and amazing things happen.

Is there something wrong w Donation? Hmm. I think it's clear.. but... Funding, donation, sponsorship... I guess they are Financial contributions, but it's a mouthful.

You saw this on the "getting involved" research thread, and I hope it's not too off-topic here, but I just fell in love with Gnome project:

"The GNOME Project is a diverse international community which involves hundreds of contributors, many of whom are volunteers. Anyone can contribute to the GNOME: the project involves a wide range of activities, not just programming."

The biggest headline: "So, what do you want to do?" - with each section underneath.

Gnome sections are even "chunkier" and generalized.

* Write (includes marketing and docs)
* Design (includes design and usability)
* Translate
* Code (also points to the Gnome Love start pages)
* Test
* Administrate

I should have put that "gnome" issue into the research thread. Anyway, I just realized there's no connection from between this issue and the roadmap - Where the heck does this issue fit in? I would like to rename this issue to "Identify interest areas for getting involved landing page", since "Review/revise 'Getting Involved'" seems a bit grandiose or at least too broad for this one issue. Anyway, I'm changing the issue title and you can change it back if you disagree!

Where does this fit in? Imagine a way for people to self-identify as skilled or interested in an area of activity. Then they could facet search results, or use it as a contact form pull down menu, etc to find related issues and initiatives.

See related:

Roadmap: Community/support/getting involved redesign http://groups.drupal.org/node/174999
Interest areas - #1010262: Identify interest areas for getting involved landing page
Create community initiative landing page content type #1288378: Create community initiative pages

Subscribing - THIS IS A MUCH NEEDED and much appreciated initiative!

A few random thoughts on the above:

#14 - I don't like that approach (faceted drill-down) as much as #13 ("What do you want to do?" big question heading, with sections on the page) or maybe #10 (headings with links, but I think I like #13 better). I'd rather see the information all visible rather than having to click/search (visible in small chunks, with links to more details).

And #5 (including the why prominently) is definitely a good idea!

Cool!

1) #14 is poached from Mozilla's Get Involved page. Their topic list is used in a drop-down menu, but also as a page listing the topics. Page of "areas of interest" http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/areas.html Also a sidebar contact form:

2) There is another related effort identifying "topics" for topic pages - and this may be overlapping.
"Creating Topic Pages" http://groups.drupal.org/node/144584

Subscribing.

douggough@drupal.org, that's a very interesting idea to show people how many are already holding that designation. We could make it work with what's on our user profiles e.g. count the people who have checked "I contributed Drupal translations". Is this just a bit of PHP to output these to a page generated by the drupalorg module?

PS you can see the # of user-specified options available.
http://drupal.org/user/#######/edit/Drupal

We'd just need to ensure that these options match the contributor options we display on that page. If we go that route (display data from user profiles) then I'll create another issue to ensure the two lists match.

If we decide not to rely on the honor system, I suspect it gets more complicated to count the # of contributors in each section... e.g. how would we ever know who contributes to Write if that also includes marketing, or who provides support on the Forums (a comment doesn't equal support in all cases)

Getting back to the organization of the ways to contribute, #13's options are good, but we need to also include evanegelizing and donations. I really like the Ubuntu example too. So for our purposes, I'd suggest we adopt the groupings suggested in #10 for now. I could def see our user profile options adjusted to include each of those options. We'd want to do that sooner rather than later, to give people time to update their profiles, so the numbers are accurate.

Also agree that the faceted drill-down is probably not the best approach. Hopefully this page can just be a node with tight access controls, rather than a tpl.php! That makes creating this page much easier ;) Even if we have someone query the database to get the #'s for each of the areas of contribution, that's going to be faster than going the code route.

I've asked drumm to weigh in on the architecture questions :)

How about this for a plan:

Getting Involved landing page -- keep it pretty much like it is now http://drupal.org/getting-involved except:

First column: Add a paragraph about the "why", including things like:
-- improve/demonstrate your skills
-- feel good about helping the community
-- etc.

Third column: Replace "Ways to get involved" with a "What would you like to do?" block. Each main word would be a link leading (I think) to an anchor on the Ways to Get Involved page [that page would also be reorganized to be an expanded version of this list, with links to specific things to do in each area]:
* Write - Create and edit documentation and marketing copy
* Design - Create themes and improve usability
* Translate - Translate Drupal, modules, themes, and documentation into other languages
* Code - Program for Drupal core and contributed modules
* Test - Verify that Drupal, modules, and themes are working correctly
* Administrate - (not sure what to put here?)
* Donate - Sponsor events and donate to Drupal efforts
* Evangelize - Spread the word about Drupal
* Support - Help others with their Drupal questions

Suggested changes to the Drupal.org Activity block in third column:
- Documentation - we have a thing on our profile now that says "More than 100 pages edited". Use a similar query to list "763 people wrote or edited documentation pages" instead of the current "365 members of the Documentation team" (I'm not even sure what that current phrase means?).
- Add a count (from localize.drupal.org if possible?) of languages or of individual translation items? Like:
45678 translations into 123 languages
- Add the number of contributed modules and themes:
4032 contributed modules
2100 contributed themes
- Add a count of forum posts (as a measure of support activity?)

@jhodgdon, I created a separate issue last night (#1414988: [Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section to talk about the redesign of the actual Getting Involved page, so this issue could just be about what the areas are, and how to group them. My bad for starting off talking about the redesign though :)

Maybe you could edit the issue summary to describe what it is you are trying to do on this issue, and point to the others? I'm a bit confused I guess.

Regarding the interest areas, I was just looking through the issue queue, and found these issues (which I'm closing as duplicates of this one):
#1150710: Add Design and UX to the Get Involved (contribute) guide (design and UX)
#1225918: Create a project management area in the How to Get Involved Guide (project management)

tagging

I think that this page should really have more life in it than it does right now.

This is about highlighting our community. Think about this page like you were checking out this company to see if you wanted to submit your resume to a company.

Do they look fun? Is it easy to find where you would fit in? Does it feel welcoming? What do you do if you have questions? Is it any different to a visitor or to a registered user?

I've attached some related issues (I think).

I'd like to see this thought through, maybe include more icons to help guide folks through the different ways they could be involved.

So many good ideas expressed here....

This content needs to change:

Ways to Get Involved

Maybe with something like proposed by @jhodgdon:

What Would You Like to Do?

Also from @jhodgdon above, we should be explaining the intrinsic motivations for people contributing. This is an opportunity to have Autonomy, develop Master and work toward a common Purpose. So what is that?

There are over 30,000 active contributors to Drupal. These users contribute for a range of reasons, but by contributing, users are able to improve their skills. Users are also able to demonstrate their knowledge within a very knowledgeable community. Many users do this in their spare time because they can pursue issues that they are interested in and feel good about contributing back to a project that is useful to them. There are millions of dollars worth of software available for free in the Drupal community, many community members feel better by being able to contribute back to the community.

Someone with real writing skills should do something more with this.

Moving this to the content queue since the Content working group is now responsible for d.o. landing pages.

I love the wording of this Mozilla Page http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

WP's is ok https://make.wordpress.org/

Ubuntu's is similar http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/

Gnome's is pretty good http://www.gnome.org/get-involved/

The /getting-involved page is a mess. Seems to be built in drupalorg-getting-involved.tpl.php with the node teaser from /node/281873 (the Getting Involved Guide) injected in on the left, a view with the latest community spotlight article in the middle and finally a block with the Ways to get Involved - /admin/structure/block/manage/block/48/configure

I'm not sure why this is, other than the interest in the 3 column layout.

I've brought over @jhodgdon text into this block, but it doesn't look right.
https://search_api-drupal.redesign.devdrupal.org/getting-involved

Having a consistent icon associated with these ideas across the site would be nice. http://thenounproject.com/ - Even they didn't have an ideas for IRC though....

I really don't think we should be putting text into drupalorg-getting-involved.tpl.php on a regular basis. This is a CMS after all and we should be using it.

Would make it much easier though to implement something like what @heather suggested in #14 though.

Thanks for all of the thoughts put into this issue. Because there's work being done now on a refresh of the Getting Involved Guide, I'm moving this issue to that new Community Projects queue and closing it. I think the Why, Who, and How questions for getting involved are being addressed in the work being done now. To see more about the work, go to https://www.drupal.org/community/about/getting-involved-guide-refresh