[Events] Brainstorming for an event idea: Earn a nice person

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all OpenHatch-y event people, and other people on this list,

I wanted to think aloud for a bit about a possible online-based event that 
OpenHatch could run that would make free software projects more enjoyable 
and productive. (We've run other online-based events before: e.g., 
ttps://openhatch.org/wiki/Build_it )

The theory behind it: Nice people are a scarce resource. There are many 
resources that open source communities have in small quantities and could 
use more of; one of them is people hanging around on email lists and IRC 
channels (and bug trackers) who are skillled at making people feel 
welcomed.

("Nice people" is actually a misnomer; the scarce resource is the feeling 
of inclusion.)

Let's spend a few weeks teaching people how to be nice, and then unleash 
them on other projects for a short while.

This is modeled after a program in Boston "Earn A Bike" run by Bikes Not 
Bombs: http://bikesnotbombs.org/EarnABike . It's also modeled after the 
success of my and Niels Thykier's "Four Days" program, in which we 
promised to answer people's emails within four days 
<http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/four-days.html>. This resulted in a 
100% increase in mailing list traffic and a 90% reduction unanswered 
threads, and moreover the general tone of the list improved.

Here's what I envision:

We create the "Earn A Nice Person 2011 Working Group" to create resources 
and manage people for the event.

The Working Group invites people to join the Earn a Nice Person program: 
either people who want to actually get a nice person in their community, 
or just people want to be nice in public and want nothing in return.

The program has two phases: Phase 1 is "Nice People Training", and Phase 2 
is "Nice People Deployment."

Both phases last for N weeks (say, N=4).

Phase 1: Nice People Training. During this, all the Trainees commit to 
hang out in the community of a chosen open source project. Their goal is 
to be welcoming without being annoying. The Working Group will write up 
some documentation on exactly how to do this. Over the course of the N 
weeks, the Trainee's goal is to learn more hands-on about how to make a 
community happier, and also to to improve his/her own skills in doing so. 
(The Trainees should send an email to their host community's mailing list 
saying that they are there to be nice, and that they are aiming to be 
friendly and not intrusive.)

Phase 1.5: Graduation. There is a one week break between Phase 1 and Phase 
2. In this period, the Working Group reviews the public activities of the 
Trainees and publicly writes a blog post that lists all the great people 
who successfully were nice.

Phase 2: Nice People Deployment. You'll recall that during Phase 1, some 
of the Trainees joined the program because they wanted to earn a nice 
person in their own community. The Working Group creates a list of those 
communities, and Trainees pick among themselves who goes to which 
community. Then for M (maybe M=4) weeks, the Graduated people are embedded 
in one of those communities, where they use the skills they've learned.

After Phase 2, the Deployed people don't have to stick around in those 
communities they've joined. We hope they might, but that's beyond the 
scope of the program.

I have some questions for the people on this Events list:

* Do you think that this would improve open source communities?

* Would you be willing to be on the Working Group?

* Are there specific suggestions you would make to improve the project?

If I don't hear much in reply, I'll try to get this going myself with just 
me on the Working Group. I'm prety excited about that already. More 
conversation, discussion, and help on the Working Group would be lovely.

-- Asheesh.