How to Self-Serve at Community Forum
Collaboration is a key element for Community to thrive and grow. Newcomers receive help from helpers, who are experienced in problem solving. In reality, a situation is not all roses. There are unpleasant things to deal with as well as the pleasant ones.
Quite often, friction stems from support expectations towards volunteers. Super helpers can get frustrated with undue pressure from newcomers and nasty comments. We all started out to become part of community out of altruistic purpose. When human interaction goes wrong, negative consequences I saw are super helpers suffer from burn-out and quit. In extreme cases, they ask community moderators to remove their account completely.
Disclosure: I’m a contributor for the Fedora Project, and a customer support manager for a global consumer electronics company.
I realized I need to do something about it. I’ll not talk about lofty mission like community health. Instead, let me share my top seven tips to turn my energy from surviving to thriving in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.
1. Search user documentation and upstream repositories
A single source of truth is in the community’s Documentation page. As projects evolve, the documentation writers and reviewers may not keep up with the new releases and breaking changes. However, I start with researching Documentation pages and release notes first. Check when the latest breaking changes were released. Documentation page shows when it was last updated.
If it is outdated, I go to upstream documentation.
2. Learn how to file a bug report
I learn how to ask right and relevant questions from bug report. Bug reporting used to be daunting to me because providing relevant information took some practice and patience.
Please check an example from the Fedora Project and a thread in Discourse.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/bugzilla-file-a-bug/
3. Gain experience with Test Day
In FOSS community, you have access to source files, change history, and release management in the open. Testing scenario is well documented, so I can follow through it with ease.
4. Get your hands dirty with tinkering
I never touched server installation before I joined a community project like Fedora. Going through installation guide and dealing with unexpected error messages or crash is the best way to expand my skills and be self-sufficient. When I spot an area to improve installation guide, I find it unique opportunity to contribute. My contribution comes from practice and failure. I like that practical side of community contributions. Check one of my project to build a home server using the Fedora ARM server edition.
5. Learn how to monitor system and deal with errors
In particular, Linux system and application provide useful error messages and stack trace. Learn how to maintain your system and troubleshoot issues using error messages and monitoring tools like $ systemctl status, systemd commands or stack trace logs.
6. Improve user documentation
After I get used to this self-serve routine, I have more time to focus on improving user documentation so our super helpers don’t get the same questions over and over again. In addition, I invest more time to learn new software that I would love to use to edit audio tracks in tutorial video footage.
7. Have user feedback
Feedback from users who read documentation pages provides me with a purpose to improve documentation and advocate FOSS software. Listen to what users say to us and act on it. Issue tracker integrated with Git repository is quite popular in FOSS community.
If the article has a separate feedback form, I respond to valid comments and criticism.
Thanks for taking time to read the article so far.
Views are my own and original.
All rights reserved by the author.
