Blog about what you do!

Am I the first to blog from GUADEC 2019? It has been a great conference: huge respect to the organization team for volunteering significant time and energy to make it all run smoothly.

The most interesting thing at GUADEC is talking to community members old and new. I discovered that I don’t know much about what people are doing in GNOME. I discovered Antonio is doing user support / bug triage and more in Nautilus. I discovered that Bastian is posting GNOME-related questions and answers on StackOverflow. I discovered Britt is promoting us on Twitter and moderating discussions on Reddit. I discovered Felipe is starting to do direct user support for Boxes. I wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t been to GUADEC.

So here’s my plea — if you contribute to GNOME, please blog about it! If everyone reading this wrote just one blog post a year… I’d have a much better idea of what you’re all doing!

Don’t forget: Planet GNOME is not only for announcing cool new projects and features – it’s “a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.” Blog about anything GNOME related, and be yourself — we’re not a corporation, we’re an underground network with a global, diverse, free thinking membership and that’s our strength.

Remember that there’s much more to GNOME than software development — read this long list of skillsets that you’re probably using. Write about translations, user support, testing, documentation, packaging, outreach, foundation work, event organization, bug triage, product management, release management, design, infrastructure operations. Write about why you enjoy contributing to GNOME, write about why it’s important to you. Write about what you did yesterday, or what you did last month. Write about your friends in GNOME. Make some graphs about your project to show how much work you do. Write short posts, write them quickly. Don’t worry about minor errors — it’s a blog, not a magazine article. Don’t be scared that readers won’t be interested — we are! We’re a distributed team and we need to keep each other posted about what we’re doing. Show links, screenshots, discussions, photos, graphs, anything. Don’t write reports, write stories.

If you contribute to GNOME but don’t have a blog… please start one! Write some nice posts about what you do. Become a Foundation member if you haven’t already*, and ask to join Planet GNOME.

And even if you forget all that, remember this: positive feedback for contributions encourages more contributions. Writing a blog post, like any other form of contribution, can sometimes feel shouting into an abyss. If you read an interesting post, leave a positive comment & thank the author for taking the time to write it.

* The people using and reviewing your contributions will be happy to vouch for you, don’t worry about that!