Summary

Plan and implement a community index to serve as a virtual "front door" to contribute to MetaBrainz projects

Background

For the community engagement and outreach part of the agenda for the 2019 MeB Summit, we discussed implementing a "community index" to act as a major entrypoint for new contributors to the MetaBrainz community. They are useful for larger, more established communities with moving parts.

There are some examples of community indexes around the web already. Check out whatcanidoformozilla.org and whatcanidoforfedora.org as an example.

A community index brings more "heat" (i.e. contributor energy and effort) and "light" (visibility into more corners of MeB) to the work done in our projects. This web service does not exist to duplicate existing documentation, but rather be a "jumping off" point into whatever the right place is for something.

Details

This web service could be divided as shown in the attached diagram. As far as how to do this, I see a "best case" and "quickest case" example:

Best case

In the case of the Fedora site, it is built with a non-organizational, generic tool that can be re-skinned to fit another project or community (see fedora-infra/asknot-ng). This is one option, but it is certainly not the only option.

Quickest case

Alternatively, this could fit into OTHER-350 and this could exist within a community / MeB docs repo. Yvan is conducting research into the Sphinx docs toolchain and if this is the right solution for us. If we go this route, we could just write some Markdown pages and get it done and over with.

Outcome

• Unified place to point newcomers to join the MeB community
• New contributors easily understand how to apply their own skills or personal interests into useful/helpful contributions in the MeB ecosystem