Creating a "Welcome to GNOME" site
In line with Initiative 1 of the Foundation's strategy, I have been working on a project dubbed “Welcome to GNOME.” It is a unified, localized landing site for everyone wanting to contribute to GNOME. It also serves as a resource to existing contributors. Like apps.gnome.org
, it makes heavy use of existing metadata to generate up-to-date content.
It is intended to be hosted under welcome.gnome.org
. A draft is available under
The project is not finished yet. I wanted to reach out to the board if there are further comments on the project in an early enough state. I'm looking forward to the board's feedback.
Feedback from the GNOME community
I already have collected feedback on the idea of the project:
- Discourse thread
- Outreach to GSoC participants
- Announcement in various Matrix channels, including all language-binding specific channels.
The feedback so far has been very positive, except for the translation project, which wants to keep its untranslated wiki pages instead. I just followed their wish and am linking to their wiki pages.
This page intends to replace the following pages
- http://www.gnome.org/get-involved/
- https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Contribute
- https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/GettingInvolved
- https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/
Some goals of the project
- Create a welcoming atmosphere.
- Welcome people instead of categorizing them as "newcomers."
- No technical terms on the start page.
- Make the pages visually appealing.
- Keep the entry barrier low to show people that they can do it.
- Translate the pages that contain the first steps.
- Automatically link to the relevant pages like the translation page for an app or the documentation for the programming language an app uses.
- Provide a page to look up basic auto-generated information.
- Lookup apps written in a specific programming language to see how they solved a problem.
- Look up how an app can be installed (Flathub, Nightly).