A while back i made the "F" model: a user-centric model of conceptualizaing Fedora to help guide decisions about how we tell the story of Fedora to prospective users on the website:
https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/a-new-conceptual-model-for-fedora/

In talking with Akashdeep and ryanlerch last night, it became clear we might need one that is contributor-centric as well. The context was that we were talking about (amongst many other things) how can we make prioritization decisions about different website/app projects aimed at users and aimed at contributors to understand which are the most strategic / best investment of time/effort and which should be lesser priority.

The F model I think has helped me at least make decisions about the design for the new website, thinking smtg similar for contributors could be used to weigh decisions about, for example, which contributor focused apps are best to work on. Like sometimes we pick projects to work on not based on their priority / strategic importance but because they seem approachable, or fun, or whatever. There's nothing wrong with the latter, but if we want to make a case to get help for important things to move forward faster.... we need some kind of high level strategy. Part of it too could help with just setting the remit for the web & apps team so they know what the heck to work on and what not to.

Some of the specific lower level things we talked about wrt a potential contributor-centric model:

• where do our contributors come from?
• traditionally we've thought about the user => contributor funnel right?
• but ive noticed as of late in the design team channel... we get folks who aren't necessarily fedora users, but are interested in free/libre culture and heard through the grapevine we have an active team and drop by to check it out
• we have other pipelines/funnels for contributors... there's also the outreachy/GSoC funnel

I think we might want a broader, documented idea of where our contributors are coming from, where they could come from, and make sure we're meeting them where they are to draw them in 🙂:

• What is the story we have for them when they come in the door? (it's getting better... we've moved from out of date static wiki page to matrix and discourse but those are tools... what is the higher level story for how we lead them in and what they experience)
• What do they experience on their journey to becoming a contributor?
• Further down their journey - what events do they attend? What swag do they receive? We don't want folks to feel things are unfair.
• Can we tie a new contributor narrative to @riecatnor 's RISE model? (https://archive.org/details/SeaGL2021-Marie_Nordin-How_I_Help_Fedora_RISE)
• Can we use the annual Fedora Contributor survey to measure how well the contributor experience is going and ask questions to help inform this effort?

We have had one contributor survey thus far and another planned for June 2022. Here are the raw results from the first:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Annual_Contributor_Survey_2021

A good first step here would be to review the contributor survey results and see if any patterns emerge / use it to inform the creation of a contributor-centric conceptual model for Fedora.

Assigning myself to this to lead this initiative.