Project:New contributors

How to keep track of volunteers and connect them with interesting activities?

The problem
We have problems in the whole contribution cycle:


 * Lack of global profiles identifying contributors
 * One contributor = many usernames from MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Mailman, IRC...
 * User profiles are plain text, relying on manual updates.
 * Lack of semantic data e.g. location, skills, interests, projects...
 * Lack of common memory about contributors
 * Personal lists maintained (or not) manually by various people.
 * Difficult to promote activities to the right people
 * Every time we start almost from scratch.
 * We lack ways to broadcast selectively by topic.
 * Social media and community communication channels are ok but too broad.
 * Manual pokes in user Talk pages don't scale, are unequally effective and are not trivial to follow-up.
 * Difficult to connect new volunteers with a first task
 * It's not trivial to arrive and find a task by yourself.
 * We don't know how many newcomers never dare to ask.
 * Those who ask find that it's not easy to get started.
 * It's not easy to give a task to someone landing with a vague request in an email.
 * Most probably the memory is lost after a few weeks.
 * Difficult to find peers and stay in touch
 * No way for contributors to find who is interested in XYZ and discuss with them.
 * Same problem: spam wikitech-l, hope to find people through Discussion pages...
 * Groups are supposed to help but group creation and membership is heavy.
 * Difficult to find inactive contributors and follow-up
 * We lack the metrics to find out who was active but not anymore.
 * English only
 * Potential communication and activities in other languages are even more disconnected.

Contributor profile

 * Ideally mediawiki.org user profile, extended.
 * Fields automatically updated.
 * MediaWiki stats.
 * Gerrit stats.
 * Bugzilla stats.
 * Labs stats.
 * Optional data fields
 * Location
 * Languages
 * Interests (mapped to contributions areas)
 * "Looking for a task"
 * "Willing to learn"
 * "Skilled & offering help"
 * Mentors & Mentees (in a wide sense)
 * OSS projects involved
 * Badges
 * Project membership.
 * Remarkable tasks completed.
 * Participation in events.
 * Contact me
 * Email from other members.
 * Social media handlers.
 * Localizable (is it already?)

Project maintainers interface
For project maintainers to interact with contributors.


 * Identifying established project contributors & roles.
 * Publish tasks for contributors tagging them by interests, location, language...
 * Send notifications to contributors interested in XYZ.
 * Seeing who signs up for an event.
 * Confirming who participated in an event + special badges.

Automatically generated info pages
Based on data from user profiles and projects. Soon.