So you want to volunteer your time to make our communities better? You have come to the right place.
While there is great flexibility in the onboarding workflow, the general order of operations is something like this:
- Read the following documents and ask questions if you have any.
- Join the InnovateForVegas organization on GitHub.
- If you have no idea what this is, read about GitHub first, then come back here!
- If you have no idea what git is, bookmark this online documentation for Git and ask questions along the way, it is a useful tool in general.
- If you do not already have a GitHub account, please sign up for one! It will be useful for many things, even if you are more interested in CreateFor.Vegas than CodeFor.Vegas and do not consider yourself a coder, since we are using GitHub for project management and discussions.
- Share your GitHub username to Addme + GitHub @ innovateforvegas.org to be added to the InnovateForVegas organization on GitHub.
- Please do try to participate in the various projects which you find interesting, including reading announcements and discussions which relate to the areas you find interesting and wish to contribute to.
- Share your email address for our mailing list at Addme+listserv @ innovateforvegas.org. This is optional, but encouraged.
- Generate a PGP/GPG Key Pair for use on GitHub and for secure email, among other things. If you are unfamiliar with PGP and GPG, please check out the primer PKI.
- Join our self-hosted messaging server (Matrix) with a client of your choice
- Join our Discord Server
- Pick your project(s) and ask about joining a project team to commence creative work!
The first few steps are rather simple, that last one is where the real fun begins and is, ironically, the one we take most seriously.
“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” —William L. Watkinson, 1907
If you are new to the open source volunteer space, please take a moment in this brief section, keeping in mind as well that all of this Foundation is powered by volunteers, no matter what role they are playing. Their time and your time are contributed toward our Foundation goals, you will be working with your peers, not for anyone. Working on projects with this Foundation is not a job, you are as empowered to contribute and collaborate as anyone else and you are encouraged to do so!
If you do feel the need to compose an angry comment or private message about anything we work on or the way we do so, please first consider these:
- Read these Howto documents. If you are not Github-familiar, one of the things we need to do is adapt processes for those new to, or not interested in, use of tools such as that, to the extent it is reasonable to do. Offer up a discussion, issue, pull request, maybe even a whole new doc to add to the collection. Backlog and other project-related particulars are in here, it is important to read first, then light your keyboard on fire with hot takes. Better, do not spend time on hot takes…
- Show up. Virtually or in-person, be a part of conversations and contribute to them, find out who needs what, maybe you can help. 100% of the effort spent complaining about what isn’t being done for you can be spent on addressing what needs to be done.
- If you are not comfortable with making things from scratch (whatever the things may be), the projects and direction of this Foundation may not be for you. Please depart quietly in that case, there is no shame in a mismatch. Just don't set the place on fire with your smoldering keyboard on your way.
Perhaps the most important thing to know is that your volunteer time is valuable, to you and to Innovate for Vegas Foundation and its members. We will always be attempting to integrate into our workflows and methodologies, the inclusion of specific attribution to you for your contributions, directory or indirectly, to any of our projects or undertakings. Sometimes this will include references to GitHub or git commits and that type of code project participation, but often this is not applicable. Making this notion compatible with all contributions and effort towards our projects is the highest priority, please be proactive in noting where we are missing something here and help us fix that!
As an extension of this awareness of the value of your time, we typically plan projects for month-long focus initially (to define goals, develop user stories, etc), with in-person and online meetup opportunities to collaborate with other organization members. As well you should feel empowered to meet with others on a particular project which interests you, any time you like, and not only within the month of focus on that project. All projects are ongoing, with different components of different projects always subject to continuing development. Hop on and hop off when you are able and when you need to.
Once your are familiar with some of the projects and teams, and what the overarching goals are (capstone projects, but more importantly job skills development, job creation, and general community elevation in our locality and beyond) of Innovate for Vegas Foundation, the time will come when you may want to suggestion a top-level project that could fit into one of the capstone focus areas, or maybe a project that is important but not necessarily in keeping with the general focus of a capstone we already have.
We do not as of this document revision date, have a formal project proposal process, so a great start is to attend a meetup or other group gathering, or join a discussion on the messaging server, and commence suggesting!
There is a growing number of current projects to work on, if you would like to contribute to one or more of these existing endeavors you are more than welcome to do so. In order that we can be as inclusive as possible, we tend to focus over a month-long period on a new project focus, with ideation and possibly innovation at meetups and via discussion and actual user story and project description development. This does not mean that all participation must take place at an in-person or online meetup. Quite the opposite.
If you would like to spend some time now and then, a few minutes each day, a few hours on a Friday, join a project team at a coffee shop on a Saturday, or whatever fits your schedule and commitment level, that is how Innovate for Vegas Foundation operates. Your volunteer time is valuable to all of the other volunteers adding their time and energy to each and every undertaking!
As you may find as you participate more and more, collaborating with people in the real world with their own schedules can be a challenge. Making that work so that all involved can make forward progress is a skill worth developing for all of your future endeavors, with Innovate for Vegas Foundation or other entities near and far.
There will be specific documents in this repository with ideas, tools, and methods for collaboration, whether virtual or in-person.
As with all repositories in the InnovateForVegas GitHub organization , and all projects that are part of the Innovate for Vegas Foundation, this repository will be made better if you contribute to it. If you are not comfortable working with Markdown documents (files on GitHub ending with .md will tend to be Markdown), please join a discussion or create an issue in this repository so that edits, additions, or other changes can be made. The Open Source approach is in full effect, If you see a problem, Fix it. Or at least, tell someone about it.
This document is an introduction to get started, there is a living directory of onboarding information here to help get up and running.
It deserves repeating, if you see something missing anywhere in this repository that you feel could help the next person to come up to speed and participate in any of our various projects, or if you see anything in any of our projects that could use some fixing or enhancement, this is what we are doing, and you are absolutely invited to be a part of that.
So Welcome to Innovate for Vegas Foundation and we look forward to your participation, read through the rest of the documents here and definitely collaborate with your fellow members!