User:Nlee/SoCon application

Summer of Content application & project proposal

Contact information

• Name: Nicole (Nikki) Lee
• Contact information: firstname.lastname@students.olin.edu

Project description

The main goal of this project is to help streamline the volunteering process, so that volunteers can quickly and easily find relevant communities and begin contributing to the project. This would involve, first and foremost, construction and organization of a 'volunteer frontpage' that newcomers would be directed to. From there, they would be introduced to the basics of the project, get an idea of what different communities are working on, and be able to not only identify potentially interesting projects, but feel free to contribute to those projects as well as proposing their own.

Currently, volunteering for OLPC can be a somewhat confusing process; finding one's way to the wiki is in itself quite a task. Potential volunteers are generally directed to the wiki by people already involved in the project, which creates a barrier for those who do not know anyone working on the project. The activation energy required of a potential volunteer who has not been recruited by a current volunteer/OLPC employee is quite high, which is undoubtedly discouraging. My main goal for Summer of Content will be to help alleviate this problem and make volunteering easier to get into, so that more energy can be directed towards working on projects, instead of trying to figure out how to get started.

Some steps in this process will include:

• Organizing a metalist of the various active OLPC communities (art, game development, translation, etc.)
• Deriving an organizational structure for these communities (divide by purpose? country? etc.)
• Organizing a new user welcoming protocol (welcome on the volunteer frontpage? welcoming squad? etc.)
• Creating a coherent 'volunteer frontpage' that can be linked to from the main page

What I'd like to be able to include:

• OLPC community metalist
• useful links on finding resources
• links to wiki etiquette tutorials (general wiki-ing, style guide, how to categorize, licensing, etc.)