Proposal

Move the guide to contribute to Gnome (GnomeLove) to a official domain, like developer.gnome.org. Rework/redesign/merge/remove all of that information and make sure it only have what a newcomer need for the firsts contributions.

Which problem I am trying to fix?

Newcommers came to IRC asking questions. They usually follow one tutorial that has some error on it. If not, they are following a mix of those tutorials, which makes their set up wrong or makes the task even more difficult since they have to take the common parts from them.

Another problem, people that help on gnome-love don't know the exact set up of the newcommers, and sometimes they have to read the tutorial the people are following to know exactly what's the error on it, which wastes the time and effort of those people.

Why developer.gnome.org?

• I has been asking all newcomers to tell me how they found the tutorial they are following. If you search for Gnome documentation it goes to developer.gnome.org as expected. So they were following that.
• developer.gnome.org is the most visited website, so having an entry for contributing there is like an ad that maybe could make someone think "fine let's try, why not".

Benefits

• Only one way to contribute to Gnome.
• Newcomers less confused.
• Low the barrier for newcomers.
• Maintainability, since we will have only one guide.
• Transmit the message that we have an official documentation for contributing, and we ensure its correctness.
• Less work for people helping on gnome-love IRC and mailing list.
• Promoting contribution to Gnome in the most visited website, developer.gnome.org.

Downsides

• Contribution to the website it's not as easiest as a wiki. We require the same difficulty for the "Get started with Gtk+", so... not sure this is a strong downside.

Keys to keep in mind

• Maintainability. We don't want walls of texts, we want a well thought single-way straightforward guide. Advanced stuff for each tool (git, jhbuild, etc) should link to the official manuals that we don't need to maintain.
• Reliability. The guide need to be enough abstract to work in the most famous distros trying to search for the lowest common divisor. If not, that distro won't be recommended until we found a good way for it.

Steps

Find what other projects do for contribution. For example Mozilla: http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/#!/progornoprog/teach And extend this page with "previous art"

Think other ways to low the barrier for contributing.

Detect which parts of wiki.gnome.org/GnomeLove are easy to move and make sense. By sections:

• Code contribution. This is straightforward and I think everything should move.
• Developer documentation. This is already in the website. We will see what to do with the newcomers tutorial.
• Documentation contribution. This needs a big face lip I would say. It repeats tutorials and links all over the place. Make it a single-way guide and I would say it should move everything to a official guide as well. Docs people opinion needed here =)

• Help & advice. these are just links

• Other. Remove this.

Detect the pages that are over the wiki about how to contribute (jhbuild guides, git guides, etc) and extract the good things and remove them if nothing else is needed from there. Probably for this we need an "Advanced stuff" part to live in the website.

Create a section "Contribute to Gnome" in developer.gnome.org and think a good structure.

Write the guide in Mallard.

Details

• Small list (one or two) of supported distros for contributing to Gnome that works out of the box with the build system (basically they don't have errors aside some faulty dependency that can be installed from the system). I know politics could have a voice here, but we only care about the easiness of contributing, not politics... Currently afaik only arch needs specific instructions. Maintain this should be easy.
• Mentors. Send an email early in the process to all the mentors listed in Mentors to ask for current availability and willingness to continue to be in that list. Ask for new apps maintainers to know if they are interested in mentoring.
• The guide will have an advanced part for Gnome-specific parts if we think it's need to have some advanced stuff there (like what to do when you gain git account access). But keep it short.
• I will take an intern for this. I think the project is enough for 3 months given all the feedback we will probably have with this big change.