[Meta/Plan] Create a new Getting Involved Guide section

Alright, so I have been following most of this - its a huge effort to consolidate all of the information around these pages. But if we want to funnel more contributors, we need to make sure the communication is clear on each topic (from Core, to the tiniest contrib project).

I have a lot of ideas, however I think we should focus on what is we want to achieve with this page. From my perspective its a landing page, to get people to move towards the topic they feel passionate about. But also to "get a feeling" what the community is about, and a more personal face on the community (hence the video in wireframe 1).

In contrary to a lot of current thoughts, I don't think we should go really in depth on the "why" of contributing, I believe its more important to get people straight into the topics they find interesting and then appeal to all the important values that are lined out in the current research. The current landing page of getting involved, is an example of where even with our good intentions we are trying to trow a wall of text at potential contributors, rather than trying to funnel to where the real activity is.

Wireframe 1

This is my first wireframe of how it could look, I have done my best to make use of bluecheese its visual hierarchy. This design would require us to make a video(where community leaders speak, and try to get people involved - a verbal way, instead of written to appeal to many of the values potential contributors expressed in the research) and images for each topic.

Wireframe 2

A less visual heavy design below, this would be something we could do without requiring much custom work.

This approach would require us to actually design each topic their page, rather than just the getting involved landing page. I am obvioulsy biased, since I lead up such a topic. But I believe showing more detailed information on a topic its goals, activity and how to get involved - is much more useful to a contributor, than general "why to get involved" information being the lead.

Looking at these wireframes as concepts at this point (I'm not going to attempt to revise the copy on them yet)...

Obviously, quite a few of the interest areas from the other issue are missing from both of these wireframes, and I guess we will need to discuss which are the most important to highlight. I like the second design better, though, in that I think it makes it clearer that there are more ways to get involved than the first one does. The first one lists quite a few areas and there is just one little link at the bottom saying "browse more", whereas the second one lists just a few and then says "browse more", which I think makes it clearer that there are more ways to "get involved".

@jhodgdon Interesting thoughts, you are right regarding the copywriting, it is just filler content. I do wish to capture most interest area's in the design though, I should do more iterations. It's difficult for the interest area's not to become like craiglist, but turning a good portion of our contributors to a long handbook list is not a good experience.

What is the experience we are striving for by improving these pages?

I am perhaps just dreaming, but ideally the experience of getting involved. Is learning about what the community is about "how awesome, exciting, open, local, learning school" (1).... then picking the topic you are passionate about (2), and learning about all the awesome things already happening, and then learning how to be part of that(3).

I feel with the research done, and all of the discussion we are moving in the right direction. But we should make an additional step, if we want to truly engage our audience. These pages somehow, need to be compelling not just informative.

With design one, and two I introduced the video to capture more than we can with text (1), and the topics to have a quick visual way of finding your interest (2) - but (3) can only be done by improving the pages that people land on after picking a topic. I know the prairie initiative is all about this, so hopefully that will enable us to actually get people started. I often feel, people don't just drop off, when encountering the "Getting involved" guide but really when they get to the topic (often walls of text with million of ways to help out).

Quick comments: between the two wireframes first one looks better to me. However distinction of drupal core, contrib and documentation from other topics is questionable. It brings up questions like - are these 3 somehow different or more important than the rest? I would prefer to see all "areas of interest" equal and visually same - either all as images, or all as text pieces.

Where this "areas of interest" will link to is another question, I am not sure that creating static book pages for each one of them is the best approach. It might be better to avoid lots of text-heavy guides and have something more dynamic. This makes me think about "top level" topic pages we discussed over at Prairie Initiative.

The list of these pages is next:
Development
Design & UX
Theming
Documentation
Translation
Marketing
Learning Drupal
Accessibility
Security
Support
Performance
Newcomers
Drupal.org (webmasters on d.o, g.d.o, infrastructure team)
Git

I think it pretty much covers main "areas of interest".
I have some more thoughts on this page, will try to put them together in the next few days.

@tvn I think there is a very clear reason why we would elevate 3 topics, or less over all the others. It's because we are designing for the 80% usecase, although having everything of equal importance is nice. It also means that finding "Git" will be as difficult as finding "Documentation". I am all for equality, but making everything of equal importance means nothing stands out, and it becomes just a really pretty "list". It has a big impact on the scan ability of the page. I do agree, making such decisions is though - because we do not have clear evidence (although the research results, give us a good idea) why a certain topic is more important than another from our audience point of view.

I would love to stay away, from which specific topic to put up, I think #1010262: Identify interest areas for getting involved landing page is about that. I would really love your idea of
using Prairie's Topic pages, that would be far better than a handbook on each topic.

I really like version two - for the reasons Bojhan outlined (more visual interest, easier to quickly be drawn to an area of interest). It's an opportunity to show the variety of what you can do, and represent what the contributor community is like.

Though I'm thinking that if we could cut tvn's pretty well rounded list from 14 to 12 and add another row of 4 to the lower part of mockup 2, we could really cover most of the interest area bases...

Another related discussion:
#1307748: Getting Involved Title Change
(just closed that one as a dup of this one)

I created an issue to make the guide link more prominent. #1744488: make Getting Involved Guide link more prominent

tagging

Interesting to see this initiative from 2012. I suspect that this is still needed. Adding a related issue.

EDIT: I do really like the work that was done https://drupal.org/node/1399056

I worry though that a lot of work went into this survey, but not sure how much was done to address the issues that came up in the report.

This was just a small sample, but still it highlighted problems that haven't been made a priority for the community.

As a part of content strategy recommendations, we'll be implementing the new 'Contribute' Section of the site. It'll include information on how to get involved and will guide users towards various different ways they can contribute to the community. The work will be based on results of the survey as well, that is a very valuable data. Re-purposing this issue for an overall plan for the section. Will update issue summary with more details shortly.

Love the sound of this — now I know what table I want to sit on this week when I’m not running around! /me adds whiteboard markers to packing list...

One thing I immediately see is we mention “Drupal core” without first defining what it is - makes absolutely no sense to an outsider.

It would be nice if we could assemble a small group of people to work on this during Dublin, Rachel. I can share high level plans for the section and how it fits overall IA/content strategy, but there is a lot of details to figure out still and work to do, such as audit Getting Involved Guide to even see what's there, what's relevant, what's heavily outdated.

tvn - book a BoF or send out a Dribble to find time - spare time is filling up quick!!

This issue still needs to be resolved... Adding a link to the survey results https://www.drupal.org/node/1399056 to the issue summary, so it doesn't get lost in the comments here. Also putting the issue summary into the usual format.

There has been some discussion in Slack recently about this idea. Updating the issue summary with our thoughts...

I've made a start at a list of target audiences for this section, in the 3rd tab of this shared spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vbIdtL-HAPK3bqiCamRIak048fcEqaWP...
(the other two tabs are the content audit, in progress)

Find me on my drupal.org contact form or in Slack to get edit access -- I'll need the email address you use with Google.

I'll add this to the issue summary...

I've just completed the audit of at least the top-level pages, and a few key second-level pages, in the Getting Involved Guide, in this shared spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vbIdtL-HAPK3bqiCamRIak048fcEqaWP...

As I look at the current Getting Involved Guide... I had some thoughts about how to reorganize it:

- Some of the info there is about connecting with the community, and some is about contributing. There's definitely some overlap, but I think those two areas should be separated -- which is in line with this issue, #1288470: Create 'Community' Section, and their parent issue #2481515: [META] Structure Drupal.org content around areas of user activity.

- For the Contribute section (this issue), I think we want to lead off with some inspiration (video? photos? contributor spotlights?), and quickly follow that with a section listing what type of contributions people can make, or what kind of skills they might bring/use, linking them to more detailed information. So, we'll probably need a landing page for each type of skill/contribution? And a separate guide about the mechanics/details/processes of contributing (many of which are shared across different types of contribution).

- I also think we should think about onboarding. When someone comes initially to this section, we should try to get them connected with a task they can do in maybe an hour, with step-by-step instructions. And then after that, connect them with more in-depth information or longer tasks. We already have a bunch of types of tasks written up with these types of instructions in the "Contributor Tasks" section https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks -- and maybe other pages that aren't in that format yet could be moved there and reformatted so we don't duplicate that list.

So... Maybe each landing page for a skill/contribution type could list:
- Overview of contributing this skill or in this area
- A couple of 1-hour tasks (links to step-by-step instructions)
- Some longer tasks (links to step-by-step instructions)
- Links to generic/background/process information

And then we'd have a separate book/guide containing:
- Generic/process information, such as how the issue queue works, using Git, how to get mentoring help, how to manage a contrib project, life cycle of a core issue, etc.
- https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks (possibly with additional tasks added)
- Links to documentation, such as the theming guide, module developers guide, etc.

Thoughts?

Adding some ideas from #2332789: Reduce Novice Contribution differences and consolidate landing pages, content, blocks to the issue summary here, so we can close that other issue as a duplicate (its aim is pretty much the same).

Adding a couple of related issues from the Mentoring project here.

In updating the issue summary on the "Community section" issue, I came across some photo sources, adding them to the issue summary.

I'm going to go ahead and add the main ideas of #22 to the issue summary. If we decide we don't like the idea, we can edit the issue summary then. :)

Following up on some related conversations in #documentation and #mentoring around the Getting Involved Guide improvements and the recent Documentation Initiative proposal it seems like there's a common need for sort of a boilerplate collaboration and onboarding process. As much of the Lessons from the User Guide to Drupal Documentation has been referenced as best practice, possibly that could be the basis for a process that would reside in this section?

Another related issue.

Quick followup to what @jhodgdon referenced in Slack -

I’d point out that we do have a fully-fledged contributors guide for the User Guide project, which includes a project manager section that explains how to set up and organize a new documentation project. And a process for making changes in the existing User Guide. That’s at
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide_guidelines/index.html
So, at least most of the processes we developed for the User Guide have been recorded.

Assuming there could be variations of such a guide that could be referenced from this 'Contribute/Getting Involved' section... where would the guides themselves reside? Would they all be considered 'documentation' guides in which we'd direct contributors here? https://www.drupal.org/node/2682083

So the question of where guides should "reside" is kind of interesting. They're just nodes, so they all live on drupal.org. The older drupal.org documentation pages had to be added to giant books (using the Book module), but this was very cumbersome (navigation could go very deep). The newer documentation guides tend to be shallower; the down side to that is that they may be hard to locate -- some of the landing pages are getting very unweildy, such as https://www.drupal.org/docs/8

But in general, I think most of the docs about how to do things (like, use git, develop modules, etc.) probably should live under https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop and the Contribute section should be limited to (a) landing pages for various types of contributing (mostly containing links to tasks and supporting information) and (b) task documentation like what we currently have in https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks

That's my opinion anyway...

Might be easier to just look at a few sections in the current Getting Involved Guide (still in the old school book format) -

https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours
https://www.drupal.org/code-in
https://www.drupal.org/novice
https://www.drupal.org/google-summer-of-code

Those are either being migrated and/or will need to be recreated/improved as a new documentation guide, yes? The guides are/would be Community Documentation, written and maintained by the Drupal community. https://www.drupal.org/documentation

With regards to this issue, ensuring the guides match the desired outcomes for visitors to the Community section of drupal.org, is out of scope?

I'm guessing that the "out of scope" comment in #31 is about who owns which pages, because currently the DA owns the Getting Involved Guide and Community section, and other pages will become Community Documentation?

So... I'm not really concerned about page ownership here as far as what is in scope for this issue -- I don't think it makes sense to create a new Contribute section, if much of the documentation it points to is unusable for people who want to contribute.

I think (assuming that we follow the plan currently in the issue summary) as we create landing pages for certain types of contributions, we'll also need to locate, possibly reorganize, and possibly rewrite documentation to link to. I think it's all in scope, but some of it may need to be spun off into child issues.

Anyway, the next step here is to see if people agree with the plan, and then start thinking about designs and details. Any thoughts about the plan in the issue summary for how to organize the section?

Thanks for reviving this issue. I think it would be great to see the Getting Involved / Contribute section improved. And, I'm sure the entire Docs WG feels the same. If this is something that people are energized to work on let us know how we can support that. Reviewing proposals, coordinating with the DA, etc.

I can also potentially help with moving existing pages to the new documentation guide/page content types. There are some tools in place to help facilitate this. Doing so might be nice because there are some additional tools available for maintainers that might make it easier for a team to coordinate on improving things.

Regarding Jennifer's comments in #22. +1, I think these are all great ideas.

Things like the git documentation should totally be moved to https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop

I think one of the fastest ways to have a positive experience contributing to Drupal is via a mentor. We should promote this, and help people who want to get connected with mentors. So many of the questions that someone comes to the getting involved guide to find answers to can easily be answered by a mentor. I think this is also closely related with on boarding, and giving people tasks they can be successful at in a short period of time.

It would be really cool if in the future, as part of the on-boarding process, when a user signs up for a drupal.org account the email they get can point them to the getting involved section, they can watch a video or two about the benefits of doing so, and then be presented with a short list ideas about where to start in-which they can find at least one idea that sounds like/looks like them. Or if, after someone makes their first comment on an issue we send a "Hey, thanks for commenting, here's some things you should know about how the issue queue works" email ... haha ... okay.

I think another common, getting involved task for open source projects is filing a bug/issue report. Might be good to make that prominent here.

I haven't gone through Jennifer's analysis of the existing content in depth yet, just a quick skim. Thanks for doing that though. I think a good future task will be to identify clear steps for improving those pages and then pointing people at them and asking for help in updating them.

I like the proposed structure. Especially making the initial landing page a bit more "Hi! Welcome, we're so glad you're here!" and less wall-of-text.

Each section on the landing page would be set off with a box or a photo or something to keep it from being a wall of text

Maybe we should try to define what the sections are going to be, and how the existing content fits into them, and what content is missing?

Regarding mentors, the spreadsheet that is collecting information for this issue (see more details in issue summary)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v9nGXGQ0SBnASTzF8WA0MhFJSr1-WqxzcQrH...
has a sheet called "Contributing - Personas and outcomes" where I made a list of types of people (skills and interests) that would be looking to contribute. For each one, the "What do we want them to find" column is a list of what information we would want them to find (the info that needs to get onto the landing page). Nearly every one lists "How to find mentors and get help". So, I think that's covered...

I've added your suggestion about pointing new users to this section to the issue summary, adding that we should also point them to Community if/when that section gets improved. I'll also add that to the Community issue's summary.

Regarding creating a bug report, I'll add that to the Personas sheet. Actually, I think maybe adding a persona for "bug finder" might be good.

So... My vision for the Contribute landing pageis that the sections (and the landing pages they point to) would mirror the "Contributing - Personas and outcomes" sheet pretty much, so that a person with a particular set of skills and motivations could quickly find the link to the landing page that will get them going on contributing in that way. Right now there are 20 of them, which is a lot to go through on a landing page that needs to be snappy, but I think they could probably be consolidated into sections under headers. I'll add a column to that sheet and see what I can do about organizing it.

In looking through the personas and organizing them into sections, I came up with a proposed organization for the landing page... adding this to summary:

Start with a landing page: lead off with some inspiration (video? photos? contributor spotlights?)

Under that, have sections as follows -- each one set off with a box or photo, and each one would have a few links that would take you to landing pages (note that some landing page links appear in more than one section, so people can find them):

• Writing and editing:
  - Add to and improve Drupal's documentation
  - Create and improve pages that promote Drupal
• Software development:
  - Improve the Drupal software by programming in PHP
  - Improve the Drupal software by programming in JavaScript
  - Improve Drupal's layout and style with HTML/CSS coding
  - Improve Drupal's usability and accessibility
  - Improve the security of Drupal
  - Improve the performance of Drupal
  - Test Drupal
  - Report a bug in Drupal
• Design and usability:
  - Improve the graphic design of Drupal
  - Improve Drupal's layout and style with HTML/CSS coding
  - Improve Drupal's usability and accessibility
  - Test Drupal
  - Create and improve pages that promote Drupal
• Translation:
  - Translate Drupal
  - Find Drupal people who speak your language [this will actually take people into the Community section]
• Training, Events, and Support:
  - Train people to use Drupal
  - Answer Drupal questions from other users
  - Organize an event
  - Organize a meetup
• Project management:
  - Start a Drupal project or initiatve
  - Help manage a Drupal project or initiative
• Contribute funds:
  - Fund the Drupal project

Quick followup to my question about scope in #31,

Those are either being migrated and/or will need to be recreated/improved as a new documentation guide, yes? The guides are/would be Community Documentation, written and maintained by the Drupal community. https://www.drupal.org/documentation

With regards to this issue, ensuring the guides match the desired outcomes for visitors to the Community section of drupal.org, is out of scope?

After reading over the just launched Documentation Initiative, improving Community Documentation seems to be one of the main goals.

Is this correct?

The community documentation will always need improvements... ones specifically related to this project can be pointed out and at least started by this project; general improvements can be done as part of the Documentation Initiative... it doesn't really matter what "umbrella" it is under, as long as it gets done.

It's a little bit unclear to me what the next step is here. Or how I can go about helping to continue this moving forward. Is the next step reviewing and building consensus around the proposed outline in #35? Or is there still work to be done with regards to developing personas and/or collecting information in the spreadsheet linked in the summary?

Here's the log of followup conversation from #documentation Slack -

gusaus [1:00 PM]
@eojthebrave Regarding https://www.drupal.org/project/content/issues/1414988#comment-12645908 -
@rachel_norfolk was the DA point person when we first discussed this project. I was under the assumption that signoff/decisions would need to come the project owner, but honestly I have no idea since I’ve never worked on docs.

eojthebrave [1:11 PM]
I think my recommendation would be to make sure we get Rachel or someone else from the DA to take a look and sign off on the proposed restructure. As like you said they "own" that content. And then to also do something like say, "Okay here's what we're proposing ..." Write it up very clearly. Give people a time-boxed opportunity to respond. And then start implementing the plan.
At which point there's probably some great opportunity for new contributors to get involved because there are very clear actionable tasks for the to take on.

drumm [1:14 PM]
Is the issue summary complete there? Looks like it might be.

eojthebrave [1:21 PM]
I think so. Again. I'm not super up-to-date on what's going on with it. But am interested in helping to get it moving forward.

gusaus [1:34 PM]
This guide I started… but Jennifer added the detail… it’s a little outdated, but I ‘think’ it provides a pretty good high level view - https://drupal.slack.com/files/U3WH506NM/FAFPCA370/Improving_the_Getting...

Some of the roles, I obviously borrowed from https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide_guidelines/management.html

Aside from figuring out if Rachel or somebody else on DA, DocsWG. or Docs Initiative is owning this, y’all have a much better idea with regards to specific roles and commitment needed to complete the initial phase.

rachel_norfolk [2 hours ago]
I’m certainly interested in the /community section, of which contribute might be a part! (And that is up for debate - what do you think? Should it be under that or at same level?)

The recommendation from @eojthebrave sounds great to me. How everything look to you @rachel_norfolk?

With regards to developing personas and/or collecting information in the spreadsheet linked in the summary...

- @jhodgdon, should contributors ask you for access to the spreadsheet?
- Are there people working or have worked on something similar who could contribute?
- How granular to we want to get with personas and roles? For instance, should we include some of the roles you see scattered about in pages like https://www.drupal.org/core-mentoring/mentored-sprint-leads or https://groups.drupal.org/node/67763

Thanks

Been trying to do some catchup today on the issues related to this initiative.

Some thoughts:

1. I’m looking forward to helping with this
2. There seems to be a lot of crossover between “getting involved” and “Community” - I think they need to be part of the same initiative and project planning
3. The Community section (at least) needs the input of the Community WOrking Group - they should be included in the project team
4. Who (what personas) are we targeting with these sections, what are their goals and what are our goals?
5. If we need pre-prepared personas for above, I believe people in DA have been working on some - will investigate
6. I’m a big fan of fixed deadlines - they help us all focus on delivery. Would presenting a delivered section at BADCamp be out of the question?

Regarding personas... The personas that the DA has used in the past for drupal.org are IMO not useful for this effort:
https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/personas
They are too generic. These are more like user stories.

Agreed that getting involved and community need to be done together. Basically we need to take the existing Community section (which includes the getting involved guide) and break it up into Community and Contribute, if we are to follow this plan (which I think is a good idea). Anyway, they are interrelated.

And a deadline is fine, as long as the people who need to give feedback give it promptly. So far, this doesn't seem to be happening (there has been very little feedback on any of the work I have done so far, for instance).

I think this belongs in the Community section issue queue now.

Is this a good project for Google Season of Docs?

Is this a good project for Google Season of Docs?

Based on the following discussion in from #documentation Slack (and assuming completing this task is still a priority), I'd recommend we work with Slurpee to see if there's an applicant interested in participating as sort of a trial run for Google Season of Docs.

jhodgdon (she/her) [May 17th at 6:47 AM]
@gusaus started a discussion on a (very long) thread about this: Should we propose a Google Season of Docs project to overhaul the "Contribute to Drupal" section? cc @rachel_norfolk -- see issue https://www.drupal.org/project/content/issues/1414988 (and issues it links to as related and in the summary) . Let's open this as a new discuss thread...

jhodgdon (she/her) [2 days ago]
If we decide it would be good as a Google Season of Docs project, we should add it to this Wiki page: https://groups.drupal.org/node/534909 -- also here is more on GSoD: https://groups.drupal.org/google-season-docs

rachel_norfolk [2 days ago]
Yeah, I like it!

jhodgdon (she/her) [2 days ago]
OK, I'll go ahead and write something up for the Wiki (which, it being a wiki, we can always edit/remove later). Those are just ideas anyway. Docs writers need to pick up a proposal and write up an application. @rachel_norfolk can I put you down as a mentor for the project (I can co-mentor)?

jhodgdon (she/her) [2 days ago]
Added to https://groups.drupal.org/node/534909

rachel_norfolk [2 days ago]
:thumbsup:

gusaus [2 days ago]
This certainly would be a good one to move forward… especially after the work you all put in last year.

gusaus [2 days ago]
Regarding https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_org_community/issues/1414988#comme...

Unless the drupal association has decided this is the best possible entry point for those wanting to get involved - https://www.drupal.org/getting-involved

Maybe there’s an opportunity to work with some of the interested Season of Docs writers on specific tasks within the larger project as sort of a trial run for the program?

slurpee [2 hours ago]
@gusaus this is perfect example of type of contributions potential GSoD writers can be working on to help their chances of proposal being selected.

Sure. Do we have any potential applicants yet? If so, where are they gathering/posting?

Here's a related issue. Maybe they should be combined?

We're having a meeting in Slack next week to discuss how to move forward on this:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/535169

We held the Slack meeting yesterday. Notes/conclusions, as well as a full transcript (not too easy to follow, as formatting isn't great) have been added to this Google doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IxH4ARJA9ZgbRbk-y7cGorujefr_7c1ZeeKD...

In case the doc goes away, here are the conclusions:

Community section/page vs. Getting Involved [working title] section

• Community landing page is for the broad overview of why to get involved in the project, and figuring out the area you might get involved in, philosophy, etc. (The “Guidance Counselor”)
• Getting Involved section is for the details of what you might do, how to do it, the tools you’ll need, along with the why for each particular task you might do [e.g. why you might want to become the maintainer of a documentation guide]. (The “Roadmap”)
• Getting Involved should also describe how to do other stuff, like participate in forums, use external support sites, attend events, etc.
• The two sections definitely need to be cross-linked.
• There also need to be links from other places (such as https://www.drupal.org/developers ). But avoid overlap with Drupal 8 Docs and Develop Guide.
• Maybe a sidebar block that we can place around the site that would lead people to Community and Getting Involved?
• We may need to add some more sections to the Community landing page. Many/most sections should point you into the Getting Involved Guide for the details.
• The contribution diagram that Gabor, Elli, AmyJune, Rachel helped with could help with guiding people from "who" to "how". [Not sure where it should go?]

Roles/personas for people who need Community and Getting Involved -- need to think about what each of these would connect to and make sure it is all there (the Content Audit spreadsheet has a tab with some ideas in this direction):

• Contributors
• Prospective contributors
• Prospective project maintainers
• Documentation contributors
• Code contributors
• Multilingual people
• Novice code contributors
• From underrepresented groups
• With limited time
• Wanting to stay involved for the long term
• Google Summer of Code, Code-In, Season of Docs
• Youth
• Students
• Testers
• Writers
• Mentors
• Site users
• Event organizers

Section title suggestions:

• “Contribute” makes some people think of money, so not so great?
• “Getting Involved Guide” or “How to Get Involved”
• “Collaborate” or “Collaboration Guide”
• We might want to change the drupal.org top-level menu item that is now “Community” to “Collaborate”, and put both the “Community” page and “How to Get Involved” under that? Or have the top-level heading be “Get Involved”, and under that we’d have “Community” (or “Find your place”), “How to Get Involved” (or “Getting Involved Guide” or “Collaborate”), “Organizations”, and “Forum”.

Format:

• Not too many clicks to get from Community to an actual task with step-by-step details
• Want to make sure it is not too overwhelming (big list of links).
• Landing page: needs intro that points people back to Community to get a broad idea of what they want to do
• Below that, we probably need a Guide(Section) for each topic, like “Get Involved in Documentation” etc. Their landing pages would:
  • Start with an inclusive statement
  • Lead new contributors and people with only a small amount of time to some quick tasks
  • Have links to a more extensive list of tasks
  • Make you understand what the priorities are in this area
  • Tell what tools you need
  • Link to standards, glossaries, and other documentation on the practicalities
  • Lead you to people who could be mentors, and people working in that space who might be familiar with priorities and how to succeed.
  • Link to Initiatives in that area.
• Once we get to individual contributor tasks, the existing Contributor Task section has good templates for the tasks.
• Under the main landing page, we would also have a section(Guide) with reference information (how to use Git, Slack, etc.) that would be common to many tasks (in parallel with the Get Involved in Documentation” etc. guides).

How to Get It Done

• Need a Project Manager (probably jhodgdon, with help from rachel_norfolk)
• Need a space to keep track of ideas (issue tracker?)
• Need a written plan, including:
  • Vision in 2-3 sentences
  • Scope (what’s in, what’s out)
  • Constraints
  • Prioritized list of deliverables (outline of section, minimum viable product)
  • Delivery date (Amsterdam? Christmas? Can we have some parts done for Amsterdam, and if so, what would the priorities be -- maybe the sections for first-timers coming to Contribution Day?)
  • Outline of the section
• Then define:
  • Next step (make skeleton so people can start to help)
  • Content inventory (already done)
  • Templates for various parts/pages
• Some people will be able to contribute if there are specific tasks to do (amyjune/volkswagenchick for example) -- what will it take to get to that point?
• No one can really help until the skeleton/templates are there
• Some people are interested in making flowcharts and the like (Chris Darke)
• Does it make sense to have a Google Season of Docs volunteer do this project, or would GSoD be better aimed at something that is more of a writing project (this is probably mostly reorganization)?
• Can we get other funding, and if so, how? Maybe set up an Open Collective?
• Who is available to work on it, and does that change if there is funding or not?

Just taking some notes whilst trying to understand the scope of the work involved:

1. Obviously, move to new content format
2. Would it help to use the same workflow as the official D8 guide? After all, this is the official guide to being part of the community
3. Or is there a halfway-house, where the top levels are built from git and there are lower-level sections edited directly?
4. There's a *lot* we can simply get rid of - we have too much. Maybe even 40 or 50%? Sounds dramatic but we benefit from having smaller, more maintained docs than we do larger out of date or simply irrelevant ones
5. Displaying the "ownership" of sections has a lot of benefits for maintenance
6. We need to step up our game on accessibility through plain language (this also benefits those for whom English is not their primary language)

I added #3061539: Update Contributor Task Cards and Stickers as a related issue as I compared the list of roles/personas collated from the content audit spreadsheet to the roles represented on the task cards. Some of figuring out task card updates could help with organization in contribution docs.

Sounds a good idea, @mradcliffe!

Moving this to the new issue component.

Also updating the title.

This issue is a duplicate of #3089403: Create content types for a new Getting Involved section, which is close to being done now.