Tools for engaging a larger portion of the community.

[mikeal]

Once we have some initial information from #1 it would be good to find tools that can reach a broader set of users. We'll need to know what questions to ask and how to ask them but I'd love to hear suggestions for tools that can reach an even broader audience than GitHub comments :)

[jonathanong]

what does this mean? stuff like nan?

[mikeal]

no, more like, and I actually think this is a poor suggestion but I'm just using it as an example: creating a simple survey that is easier to engage with than arguing in issues.

[YurySolovyov]

There are tons of survey services, and I think invitations to such surveys should be sent from trusted and popular sources, sources(twitter, podcasts etc.), so that many people can participate.

Or you are talking about trying to engage more people to contribute to/discuss node?

[mikeal]

Sure, we can do a survey, but casual users won't fill out a giant survey, which means we'll need simple targetted questions, and not that many of them. So there needs to be a lot of work before a survey where we pair all of this down and create those questions. As of right now, I don't have a lot of great ideas for doing that in an equitable manor that brings in a wide range of users.

[smikes]

Rather than doing a giant survey, maybe break the survey into manageable chunks and offer a survey link whenever someone is trapped watching the npm spinner. (Would require cooperation of @npm I suppose).

$ npm install
\                _Help move node forward: take a survey while you wait_

[ronkorving]

I think it should be a lot easier for people to contribute to the documentation. How, I'm not sure. But currently it all goes through the same scrutiny as normal pull requests. Perhaps without the requirement to fax a waiver to Joyent (already done, right?) and a faster commit pipeline (node-forward?), this may just be resolved to some extent. I still can't help but think the documentation could really be improved massively through community input. What tools? I have honestly few suggestions, and I do think keeping the actual docs in git makes sense.

[erunion]

Github used to send out a yearly survey of about 10 questions asking you on how you use Git. The questions were all pretty simple, and the whole thing took less than a minute to fill out. I can't find any of the survey links in my email history, unfortunately. Possibly someone from GH can chime in?

[sunnyrjuneja]

Railsbridge used to hold bug smashes to solve issues in rails core. Mentees would spend time researching code and attempting to solve bugs while mentors gave some insight on where to find things. I would love to see a similar model for iojs.

[smikes]

Railsbridge used to hold bug smashes to solve issues in rails core. Mentees would spend time researching code and attempting to solve bugs while mentors gave some insight on where to find things. I would love to see a similar model for iojs.

That sounds really cool! Maybe that could happen at a biggish community event such as nodeconf?

[vtambourine]

I believe voting systems can work out, like ones in YouTrack or other issue-tracking services. In that case, all suggestions from #1 must be converted to issues. Users and developers will be able to vote for issues more important from their point of view or suggest new ones to community review.

[Qard]

@smikes @whatasunnyday At the 2013 nodeconf there was a session helping newbies contribute PRs for bug fixes and documentation changes. Perhaps that could be expanded to a full event. It could even make use of https://nodebug.me/ to evenly distribute the focus. :)

[sunnyrjuneja]

@Qard That's really cool. I'll definitely take a look at that.

[Nicolab]

Wiki is convenient.

[michaelgrilo]

Perhaps a collaborative decision making tool like Loomio would go well with the open governance model.