The Ubuntu Developer Advisory Team has been in place for two or three release cycles already and it’s been a fun journey so far. We’ve got in touch with many many new contributors and old contributors as well. If you don’t know what this team does, here’s what our wiki page has to say: We Reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get feedback. Reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and help them....
Some of you might remember when Andrew Starr-Bochicchio send out the Developer Advisory Team’s analysis of the feedback new contributors gave us. It was a great read, told us a lot about how new contributors get involved, but it was a also quite a bit of work. As we conducted most of our interviews via mail, we had lots of answers in our inbox. As a team, we put them into a Google Doc and after the release cycle had passed, we had amassed 6 months worth of feedback....
For more than once cycle I have been involved with the Developer Advisory Team and it’s been a fantastic time. I’ve blogged about it before, but if you need a short intro, you could watch the lightning talk from last UDS about it. Think of it as a team of people who help to make the development experience of Ubuntu more social. We welcome new contributors to the community, we collect feedback, we help with applying for upload rights and the atmosphere in our team is great....
One class of new contributors has always been successful: self-starters who knew what they wanted to do, where to get involved, with possibly some already existing experience or knowledge. For others it’s been a tougher ride. To remedy some of this, we set up the Developer Advisory Team. We figured that (among other things) reaching out to new contributors who just got their first fix into Ubuntu to thank them, encourage them and ask for their feedback would help us a lot in terms of bringing them into the fold and finding out what current stumbling blocks are....