[Devel] A vision statement for the main website

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Asheesh Laroia wrote:

> Can you come up with a Vision Statement for the OpenHatch site as a whole?

mllerustad, paroneayea, FHaag, and I were on IRC, and here is what we came 
up with for now. It turned into more of an /about/ page than a vision 
statement.

What do you guys think?

What we wrote
-------------

Free software happens through a community of people supporting, nagging, 
and cheering one another on. However, we believe that our community loses 
tons of prospective members because learning how and where you can fit in 
is difficult.  New people often have to overcome confusing jargon, a fear 
that their effort might not be welcome, and a lack of personal connection 
to the community. OpenHatch is an ongoing project to address these issues, 
through our website and in-person outreach efforts.

For new contributors, the OpenHatch website is an entry-point to friendly 
people and projects from across free software. Self-starters can browse 
thousands of volunteer opportunities from projects and find one that 
matches their interests and skills. We encourage the sense that the 
community is nearby through people search, the ability to find mentors 
within a project, and a map to help you find participants in your 
neighborhood. On project pages, the existing community makes personal 
appeals for help. You can privately learn skills related to paticipating 
by using the training missions. (Read more about <a href="/wiki/For new 
contributors">how new contributors can make use of the site</a>.)

Projects can use the OpenHatch website as a set of resources for making 
open source comprehensible to a newcomer. You can send new contributors to 
our training missions to speed up the tutoring process. The Q&A on each 
project's page explains to people where they can fit in. Projects can list 
their bite-sized bugs in the volunteer opportunity finder. Your project's 
ability to get utility out the OpenHatch site scales up as you put in more 
effort. (<a href="/wiki/For project members">Read more about how current 
participants can use OpenHatch</a>.)

You can also use the OpenHatch website as a place to build a profile of 
your presence in the community. As free software contributors, our 
identities are scattered across commit histories, email lists, and IRC 
channels; your profile on OpenHatch can help people understand who you are 
in the community. We automatically import some types of contributions, and 
encourage you to round out the picture with the rest. (Read more about <a 
href="/wiki/Profile importer">the profile importer</a>.)

> P.S. Part of the reason this is confusing is

Uh, why didn't I finish this thought?

Who knows!

-- Asheesh.