[Mageia-discuss] Team Membership Query

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

I am a long time Mandrake/Mandriva user (since Mandrake 7.1).  I have a lot of
experience with Mandriva system administration and use,  I even administer
Mandriva Enterprise Server systems for my engineering department at work
(though I am not on IT staff).

I am starting to realize that Mandriva is no longer what I once valued.  It
seems like the community I knew as "Mandriva" is now named "Mageia", and the
demise of the Mandriva distribution as I grew to know it makes me think about
how to take more part in making sure it survives.

I'm a family, working man with young children. I support free, open source in
various capacities, but one would probably not call them prolific.  One more
visible contribution is via the http://sourceforge.net/projects/crossfire/
team.  I tend to work in spurts, and sometimes real life takes me away from
these side areas of interest.

I tended to think that probably official distribution support teams were more
likely to want people that could consistently pour significant time into
things, but a #mageia-social / #mageia IRC user said that should not stop me
from looking into it further.

Are any team members interested in giving feedback about whether they see
benefit in incorporating light contributors or not?

After looking over the teams, specifically it seems that the documentation
team and packaging teams could fit my core skills.  It occurs to me that the
documentation team might be more amenable to light contribution than a
packaging team, but I don't know.

Some challenges are that I am in the USA and it seems that meetings on IRC
tend to happen at a UTC time when I cannot participate.  I contribute to local
organizations on a weekly basis, so its not like this would be a primary time
contribution outside of often extended working hours.

I guess once I get a sense for whether it is reasonable to approach teams I
could go into more detail about what I can do.

What do you (team leaders/members) think?  Do you appreciate all the help you
get, or do you need more of the kind of resource where you can make regular,
specific sorts of assignments that get done promptly.  Do you expect team
members to be ready to work anytime, or do teams have things to do that can
sustain more flexibility?

kbulgrien on IRC