Creating a more inviting environment for newcomers

New experiences from MoM, SoB, Teammetrics

DebConf 15, Heidelberg, 15. August 2015

Since 2008 I'm working on graphing data about teams in Debian. In 2011 a GSoC project "Teammetrics" established some better infrastucture and some additional measures were added. The last addition was a number of maintainers per packaging graph which also creates some enlightment how good a team works together.

Besides measuring how teams are working together I'd like to explain ways how to gain new team members by lowering the entry barrier. This is done in the Mentoring of the Month project for Debian Med. I was also running a Mentoring of the Month for Women by droping the constraint of medical software. It was a specific challenge for me to introduce an outsider into a team I'm no member of and where I was unaware of the specific team policy.