Our global jam is coming up this weekend, and I wonder what we can do to increase participation and also collaboration between the different events. Maybe we still have time to implement some of the suggestions.
SnapOverflow
Our global jam is coming up this weekend, and I wonder what we can do to increase participation and also collaboration between the different events. Maybe we still have time to implement some of the suggestions.
Starting a twitter account. Posting updates and relevant news. Reaching out to prominent bloggers in the Ubuntu and Linux world. Posting on forums, just getting the word out. I see on your website you have badges. Get as many people as possible to post the badge maybe some sort of contest. But then again people only do what they want to.
Also directing people with a very specific goal, much like a video game. Help them feel that they are actually contributing in a measurable way. reputation or goal bars for example.
Either way goodluck! :)
I think a big thing is that concrete > vague. Tools like harvest and such that help users find specific items to work on will help increase participation and work. I'd love to see each area (packaging, bugs, docs) have someone up the team work on a "todo" list of things they'd like to see get done for the Jam. This way the participants and would-be participants can go through the list and hopefully get more useful concrete accomplishments done. I know our Jam is very vague. "Let's all get together, have some pizza, and find something to do". I'm sure a lot of time won't be very Jam productive while it will be fun for us :)
what I've found works well is to have a bit of structure to it. Have a rough timetable of what you and your team want to do. Keep it basic, cover the small things like logging into launchpad creating an account, there will be people who've not done it before, lets encourage all levels to take part.
Next talk about bug and how the role of logging one has an effect, now talk about triaging them.
There are different levels of a global jam, so why not get people working in groups of 2-3 people who work on different areas, like wiki clean up, bugs, documentation, plans for the team for the future.
Take a break and chat about the work you've done, don't forget about the online community, join in #ubuntu-locoteams and let others know how you are getting on, if you've reported a bug poke someone to verify it.