Proposed RFC Suggestion: Make community the clearing house of process

[lmbr-pip]

Summary:

Add structure to community repro to provide guidance to new users and to aid discovery of the great content here.

Proposing we organize content around three main themes

• Develop (Use existing https://github.com/o3de/community/tree/main/contributors)
  • Links to existing getting started guides
  • Overview of how to contribute
  • Links to existing Contribution guides (ie https://github.com/o3de/community/pull/144, https://github.com/o3de/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)
  • Links to style / coding guides
  • Links to deprecation guide
  • Breaking change guide
  • RFC process
  • Brief doc on how PRs work - Making PR, link to guides, AR process etc (link to https://github.com/o3de/community/pull/144)
• Process (New https://github.com/o3de/community/tree/main/process)
  • How to communicate with the project (discuss GHI, Discord, mailing lists)
  • Division of effort, TSC, SIGs and what they are responsibie for, marketting.
  • How to file bugs and feature requests - Making GHI, expectations
  • How to update the community docs (guidance for contributors to these pages)
• SIGs (New https://github.com/o3de/community/tree/main/sigs)
  • Common SIG docs include SIG issue triage guide, PR guide
  • Election process

Update the README.md to be more of a landing page.

What is the motivation for this suggestion?

Community has lots of useful content but theres no organization, theres no guide as to what this is or where to find content.

Suggestion design description:

Covered above mostly so skipping detailed design for now

• May as needed move some docs (like SIG election guidance) under these folders, to provide more clarity.
• Not proposing move https://github.com/o3de/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md as this is linked from several external locations, but may revise to add some additional links.

What are the advantages of the suggestion?

Make o3de/community be the process wiki for the project like https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Main_Page. Acts the clearing house for links, even if the links are SIG/release or other repros

What are the disadvantages of the suggestion?

• Currently no clear guidance around who can update community. Lack of ownership from all SIGs.
• May repeat existing content, but will improve discovery of content thats not on o3de.org

How will this be work within the O3DE project?

• It will only contain general guidance information, SIG specific information will just be linked.
• Will add links to https://www.o3de.org/contribute/ and https://www.o3de.org/docs/contributing/ where appropriate.

Are there any alternatives to this suggestion?

• Could use the actual GitHub wiki but theres no approval mechanism there, anyone with permissions can live edit.
• Expand https://www.o3de.org/docs/contributing/ and https://www.o3de.org/contribute/ . But believe o3de.org and docs-community do not have capacity or desire to own 'process' docs.

What is the strategy for adoption?

• Will review o3de.org links for contributors and redirect to o3de/community as much as possible. Some of the content will migrate to o3de.org site
• Advertise in sig-all when changes are made, to increase visibility and request contributions
• Work with TSC to gain guidance and alignment for other things.

[hultonha]

I'm fully supportive of this idea! 🥳

For the Develop section, I'd suggest moving all 'guide' style docs to the 'guides' folder (currently in the root of the community repo with review and deprecation guides being there already, it could be moved to go under a 'Develop' folder in future). There are some docs in sig-core for things like coding standards and API ref guidelines that could be moved there too.

Overall an excellent idea and it will definitely help people from the community find their way around much more easily!

Thanks @lmbr-pip! 😄

[lmbr-pip]

Early contribution towards this: https://github.com/o3de/community/pull/151

[chanmosq]

I support this RFC proposal!

As part of the development theme, I suggest we also include links to docs contribution guides to the community landing page. (Assuming that these themes are the basis of creating the landing page.)

+1 to have README.md be a landing page. This will highly improve visibility of all the important information in this repo. I see this page being a great starting point for contributors. To further increase visibility and unification, I'd also recommend other sigs link back to the community landing page as well.

For the general process docs in this community repo, the processes for docs may differ so we'll need to link accordingly. Feel free to add me or sig-docs-community to related PRs, so I can watch out for these. (I've added some comments to the PR you linked above, for example.)

I'm all for updating o3de.org/docs/contributing and o3de.org/contribute as well, to be consistent with the community repo. I think this is an important step so that the separate contributing docs don't feel disjointed.

Awesome stuff, thanks for putting this together 🙂