Netiquette for newcomers (Everyone was a newbie once)

“People take different roads  seeking fulfillment and happiness.  Just because they’re not on your road  doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”
    Dalai Lama XIV

It is important to note and understand that newcomers and veterans are both necessary for and valuable to the community. For that community should look after newcomers, since they will be the veterans in the future, and without them the community and project is not sustainable.  If a project doesn't make a good first impression, newcomers rarely give it a second chance.

The free communities should offer to newcomers a least:

•  Setting up a project web site that's infomative to newcomers
•  A guidelines for newcomers (Beginner's Kit/Etiquette Guide)
•  A groups of members with few experience. (news.announce.newcomers)
•  Getting starting section.
•  Every channel topic is a brief message each user sees when they first enter the channel.
•  Tasks easy to do.
•  Assigning a mentor.
•  Section of common errors.

Newcomers may be annoying to other members of community. They ask the wrong questions, including ones that seem obvious (or whose answers seem easy to find). But lots of valued contributors started out this way, and treating newcomers kindly makes them more likely to turn into the valuable community members.

So while you don't have to humor them or suffer them gladly, and it's fine to point out when they make mistakes, point newcomers in the right direction in addition to turning them away from the wrong ones, and be kind to them in the process of correcting their transgressions.

The community manager should promote online or onsite training events for expert members in general and newcomers in particular.

A good way to determine what to include is to base the document on the questions that newcomers ask most often, and on the complaints experienced developers make most often.

As a project acquires history and complexity, the amount of data each incoming participant must absorb increases. Those who have been with the project a long time were able to learn, and invent, the project's conventions as they went along. They will often not be consciously aware of what a huge body of tradition has accumulated, and may be surprised at how many missteps recent newcomers seem to make. Of course, the issue is not that the newcomers are of any lower quality than before; it's that they face a bigger acculturation burden than newcomers did in the past.


[0] Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers)
[1] Welcome to the wiki of The Document Foundation Jump to: navigation, search (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette#Dealing_with_Newcomers)
[3] Producing Open Source Software, Karl Fogel