This working group is an informal group of people who work to provide tools and documentation that make first-time contributors to Apache projects, and those looking for their initial point of entry, more welcome.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Guiding projects towards the incubator. This includes the “why would you want to be at Apache? Why would you NOT fit at Apache?” documentation that we really don’t have yet.
• Guiding brand-new contributors towards how, and where, to contribute. This may include working with some of our more welcoming projects to figure out best practice, and our less-welcoming projects to figure out why they are and help them fix that.
• Working with second-time contributors to encourage best practice. (See https://mikemcquaid.com/stop-mentoring-first-time-contributors/ for thoughts on first- vs second-time contributors)
• Crafting boilerplate answers to send to folks who show up asking for help getting involved, so that we don’t continue this practice of unhelpful “go figure it out on your own” responses.
• Maybe work on some kind of a badging program (See https://badges.fedoraproject.org/ if you don’t know what I mean by that) to incentivize and gamify community engagement, for reasons that I would love to talk much more about, but are beyond the scope of this proposal.

This working group is in the STARTUP stage, but some work has already started.

To communicate with this group, please subscribe to the ComDev mailing list. Messages about this WG should use a [WG: welcome] subject-line tag, so that they are easily filterable and distinguishable from other mailing list traffic.

Anyone with ideas and a willingness to work collaboratively with us is welcome to come participate in this effort. Join the ComDev mailing list, introduce yourself, and tell us what you'd like to work on.

A rough list of what we're working on can be found in the work in progress file.