getting involved

Before diving into this post let me tl;dr: Fostering good communication with new users.

So I asked around on #drupal-contribute to see if there was a guide for helping and guiding users who want to help out with Drupal. There does not appear to be one so here is an attempt to make one. The goal of this discussion is to create an outline which will then get folded into the Drupal documentation for mentoring users. Lets play out a scenario to show where guidelines could help.

A user comes into the irc channel and states they want to help with a project and asks "Where should I start?"

Hello, all,

There have been some conversations recently about adding features into DrupalEd -- the main discussion has been around improving documentation and supporting different types of install profiles, but, IMO, there are also other areas where things can be made better.

First off, for those who are offering suggestions, thank you. Using the install and providing feedback gives us all a place of reference from which to start the discussion, and get more people contributing into DrupalEd.