Gentoo User Relations

1.  Project Description

The Gentoo User Relations project's main function is to act as a facilitator for the various user focused projects within Gentoo. The project takes the initiative in soliciting feedback from users and developers, creating surveys on relevant issues, promoting the distribution to individuals and groups, and fostering cross-project interaction.

The project also offers a point of contact between the development and user communities. It looks at ways of keeping advanced users and prospective developers informed about the development community, and encourages relations between the two communities.

It is important to note that user-relations' activities are intended to be proactive rather than reactive -- any specific conflicts or other incidents are dealt with by other groups; our part is to help reduce their workload by making such incidents less likely.

What we do

The user-relations project's activities and responsibilities include:

• Resolve conflicts where possible, and find creative solutions to them. Help to work through ongoing conflicts, miscommunication, and other such issues that affect our relationship with the user community.
• Help to turn 'more communication' into 'better communication'.
• Understand and appreciate different project types and management styles.
• Collaborate with, and where possible learn from, the user community.

What we offer

User-relations acts as a form of umbrella project, providing resources and input to the projects in its area of responsibility. Some of the things we can do for projects include:

• Arrange cross-project meetings for discussion of issues that affect more than one participating project.
• Develop and carry out user surveys, and other methods for gathering input from the user community.
• Provide a central source of information and resources to make user-focused projects' jobs easier and more productive.
• Encourage and facilitate sharing of experience and expertise amongst participating projects.

Overall, we intend to encourage relevant projects to co-operate with each other and with us. Our main goal is to help projects to do their own jobs by providing information and support as outlined above, and to represent the needs of the user community within Gentoo. As such, in our dealings with projects we focus more on how to achieve their goals, leaving the goals themselves for the projects to decide on. To this end, we hope to stay objective, and be seen as a facilitator helping the projects to do what they want to do, rather than an authority dictating policy to others. We can also act as a single entity to represent all the participating projects should any of them wish to implement anything that would need discussion with other parts of Gentoo.

Larry The Cow: Since the Summer of 2006 User Relations have been providing you with the LTC community project; this includes larrythecow.org which serves a selection of user blogs. To have your blog included, drop an e-mail to beandog@gentoo.org. We value greatly the feedback that this project provides for us.

2.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

3.  Subprojects

The userrel project has the following subprojects:

4.  Participating Projects

Some of the projects and groups with which User Relations are working closely include:

• Gentoo Public Relations
• Gentoo Forums
• Gentoo Bugdays
• Gentoo Infrastructure
• AMD64 (and other) Arch Testers
• Gentoo Bugzilla
• The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
• #gentoo ops
• Planet Gentoo
• The Overlays Project
• Project Sunrise
• Developer Relations
• Release Engineering

5.  Getting Involved

There are a number of areas in which interested users can contribute to Gentoo:

Gentoo Linux Development team: Prospective developers are encouraged to become active on bugzilla. The bug reports are monitored by development recruiters, so start squashing bugs and you will become noticed.

Gentoo Bugdays: On the first Saturday of each month both developers and users gather in #gentoo-bugs on irc.freenode.net where bugs are tested, discussed and resolved. Bugdays offer a great way for developers and users to work together and get to know each other. It also provides an opportunity for potential developers to be scouted. For further information the Bugday team can be contacted.

Gentoo Linux Documentation team: The team provides users with clear and concise documentation. It is comprised of Technical Writers, Editors/Proofreaders, and Translators. For more information on joining take a look at the Gentoo Linux Documentation Policy.

Gentoo Weekly Newsletter: If you would like to offer your help to the GWN team as a contributor or translator then contact information can be found in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter Overview.

#gentoo IRC Channel: Knowledgeable users are encouraged to come and help out in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net.

#gentoo-dev-help IRC Channel: Anyone wanting to know more about ebuild writing and/or Gentoo development is welcome to come and ask in #gentoo-dev-help on Freenode, where developers and other users are waiting to help.

overlays.gentoo.org: The Overlays project offers social workspaces bringing users and developers closer together. Providing a testing ground and development sandbox for teams within Gentoo to collaborate directly with users. Please check out overlays.gentoo.org and their project page for more information.

Project Sunrise: provides a starting point for users wishing to contribute to Gentoo, the project encourages users to write ebuilds and under close supervision the project ensures that the user contributed ebuilds meet Gentoo QA standards. You can find more information about Sunrise on their project page.

6.  Contact User Relations

Do you have questions about the Gentoo development community? Do you have a suggestion to improve Gentoo? Then we'd love to hear them. Send an email to userrel@gentoo.org or the gentoo-userrel mailing list, or find us in #gentoo-userrel on irc.freenode.net.