Hello Greg,
I hope you’re doing well. I had a funny thought - ever considered making a clone of yourself to handle all the tedious tasks? 
On a more serious note, have you thought about expanding the Community Team? Delegating some of these tasks might ease the workload. I’ve been observing your work from the beginning, and I must say, I’m impressed. I doubt I could keep up with your pace…
Take care man!
I’m going to split this to a new thread, because I think it’s a good topic (and we’ve moved away from badges!)
Actually I already delegate most of that - but talking to y’all is never tedious 
So there’s two versions of this question - the first is “expand the team” which basically equates to hiring people into Red Hat. That happens (I myself was hired from a different community over a decade ago ), but it’s not fast. However there is also “expand the roles the community can fill if it wants to” and that we are working on. @gotmax has a lovely blog post about doing the first community-led release of the Ansible package, and we want to enable more of this sort of thing.
If you look to a community like Fedora, you might find their org chart which I think does a lovely job of showing off loads of areas you might contribute to - and I think we need to start using this as inspiration. There are many ways to contribute to Ansible - and dedicated organisers to help run things are part of that
So let me turn it back to you - if could pick anything, what would you contribute to? You already help out here on the forum, for example, and that’s awesome - but are there other areas?
That’s a very good question, and I assure you that I’ve been meditating a lot about this during the last few weeks… For example, I already joined the Execution Environments workgroup here on the forum, where we identified a problem with it’s documentation across different places:
I thought of doing my first collaboration on the EE’s documentation area, since I’ve an special interest on this. I’ve never collaborated on any Open Source project though, so I’m still trying to get used to the mechanics (that’s why I spend most of the time collaborating on the forum’s get-help section).
Also, I’ve identified an ansible-navigator feature that I believe it would be great to have:
Not sure if that’s even possible… but what the heck, If I don’t try I’ll never know
So to start with, I’d start collaborating on those two areas: Documentation & Dev-Tools features / bugfixes, since it’s what relates the best with my current role at my workplace. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind to get away from my comfort zone and become involved in community matters also, since I’m here not only to become more skilled on Ansible stuff, but also to build new frienships 
Awesome work! Thanks for all of it, it matters more than you might know.
One of the trends I’ve observed in open source is that, in general, communities tend to calcify over time (that is; they become more rigid, more difficult to contribute to). We are no exception, and I believe the counter is more communication.
However, it’s a hard trend to reverse, and it requires a bit of leap of faith - because then everyone has forgotten how to talk, and how to listen. So when a user has a good idea, they often don’t come tell us - and when a dev team wants input on a problem/feature, they don’t ask (or they ask and get no responses). So someone has to ask even though they feel they might not be listened to - and that’s difficult.
To break that cycle and build momentum again takes effort, and even as small a thing as a single reply to a feature discussion can be all it takes to make sure that person asks/comments again in the future. It’s going to take work to build up that culture of asking/discussing/deciding in public again - so thank you for being a part of it, and keep it coming 
You’re welcome Greg! I did it gladly
It was great to have this conversation with you today, really. It also gave me the boost of motivation I needed to go one step further (or two!). I’ll keep trying to decide which and when will be the first step, but I’m pretty sure it will be sooner than later.
Have a nice day mate!
Coming in late here but @jbericat - where would you think to look if you wanted to find ways to contribute within the Ansible community? And if you did find anything (outside this forum) was there anything that gave you pause that you weren’t sure if it would be a welcome contribution/idea etc?
Hello Sandra, first of all thanks for keeping this thread alive. I have not stopped thinking about it, and I believe I’m not the only one here (right @Leo? ).
During this time I’ve come to conclude that there might be a few gaps to fill in regards of the “Ansible land” (I choosed the word “land” over “ecosystem” on purpose, since the latter is already used to define the different parts of the whole thing, while the former can be used in a more wider way).
Let’s do first a little bit of brainstorming by just enumerating the different ideas I had during the last few days / weeks. If those are sound, we could develop them later in separate posts or even threads:
Induction path to Ansible (from the end-user perspective). For example, this could be implemented in an app such as Make for Arduino (I really love that one!), which makes the learning process a loooot easier than looking for info on the Internet. Anyway, this is only a wild idea I had a few days ago while I was bored to death on a flight, it just came to me right now while writing these lines 
But the main idea of the Induction Path to Ansible could be a good one to explore.
Ansible collaboration paths. This could be a guided process (maybe with a pretrained AI model?) with its own milestones and rewards system (badges? extended trials / licenses for Red Hat products? A trip to the Caribbean sea? 
), where newcomers could stablish a set of skills to start with, and then the AI would suggest a path of “guided challenges” , where the AI could assist giving tips, links to specific docs and so on. Again, this AI thing is another super-wild idea I’m pulling from under the hat right now, but the main thought of the Ansible collaboration paths still can be implemented on so many ways… Another example; I’ve seen quite a few times people coming to the forum and asking how they could collaborate, but yet I fail to see a category or wiki intended for this!! I remember @Leo sharing a few months ago a quite a bunch of links & info on how to start collaborating. This could be a good starting point for that wiki… I myself could take care of that once I get back home from my little vacation leave in Poland (such a beautiful country btw!) At least, a page / wiki linked on the forum’s footer could be useful:
Ok I believe I’m gonna stop right here by now, since it’s becoming kind-of hard to write such a large post on my phone…
PS: I published this post unwillingly waaaay before I finished it, that’s why there are so many edits I’ll try to add complementary info this weekend, since I’m not totally sure if I completely addressed all @samccann questions
