IRC/welcoming

The IRC Welcoming Dance!

This is an outline of many of the features often found in the #dreamwidth IRC Welcoming Dance.

• Greet and welcome the new person.
• Inquire from whence they have come (from dreamwidth.org itself, from the FLOSS community, browsing through Freenode channels, or otherwise) as this may make a difference in the background information they have about the project and the purpose of the channel.
• If unfamiliar with the site/development project, it is often appropriate to explain; a number of freenode-browsing folks are unaware that #dreamwidth is ultimately centered around a coding project, and may have just dropped by to chat. Random chat folks are of course welcome as long as they act in accordance with acceptable channel conduct.
  • Dreamwidth.org is an open-source social journaling project, a code fork of LiveJournal.com established in 2009. Diversity statement, guiding principles, and open source manifesto: http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/opensource
• There is an infobot; infobot has been trained with some helpful links, including help on itself and some of the other channel bots.
  • infobot, help infobot
• For FLOSS folks who are looking to get involved, do they have a dreamwidth.org account? It is not required, but it is a helpful tool for development and becoming/staying informed about all the things.
• Would developers like a dreamhack? They are free hosted Dreamwidth development environments.
  • infobot, dreamhack
• If they plan to contribute code, layouts, documentation, or the like, before their contribution goes live, they'll need to sign and return a contributor license agreement.
  • infobot, cla
• Other volunteer stuff besides development exists; there are some Dreamwidth.org communities with organizational stuff/info.
  • infobot, communities
• Basic channel rules: don't be a jerk. Politics, especially US politics, and religious wars are not allowed. (Beyond the simple principle that it's easier to keep the peace in a low-politics zone, the site owners' politics differ enough that the two of them need to never talk politics with each other.) More detailed rules links are in the topic, which are: http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/notes/IRC#Rules & http://dw-volunteers.dreamwidth.org/14888.html
• Information on the Dreamwidth IRC channels in general:
  • infobot, irc
• If people are using jargon you don't understand, don't be afraid to ask; there's also a collection of some of the local jargon.
  • infobot, jargon
• There is a quotes database, featuring fun moments of times past and with some information about general channel culture.
  • infobot, qdb
• Standard disclaimers about food, fiber arts, and volunteerism.
  • http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/IRC#Hazards