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.
• 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.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/IRC#Hazards