As our community grows so does the need for volunteers! Looking at the ‘contributor drips,’ I’m wondering if we can trim down the initial email to serve more as a light ‘introductory’ email that briefly addresses each role in our community which then directs them to our website to learn more. @ivange94 @hilz041 @maurya
My suggestion reduces the original email from 699 words down to 402 words.
I want to propose that our first response be changed to:
Hi there! Thank you so much for your interest in OpenMRS. My name is Nicole, and I’m part of the volunteer team that helps people interested in contributing to OpenMRS find interesting work. We’re really excited to have you join our community of volunteers, and to help us work toward improving global health!
As you may have noticed, there are many ways that people can join our community by making technical contributions. Here are some starting points for you to review.
The most important key in participating in the OpenMRS Community is getting an OpenMRS ID. It’s a free account that you’ll need to fully connect with the rest of the community. Take a moment and sign up right now if you haven’t yet at http://id.openmrs.org/ - it only takes a few seconds and you can come back to to this e-mail when you’re done.
There are so many ways for you to get involved with OpenMRS! Whether you are an expert in coding languages, are skilled in application testing, love documentation and writing, are able to translate into different languages, or want to support the community as help desk respondent, we’d love to get you involved!
You can learn more about each role here: http://openmrs.org/join-the-community/
After you’ve taken a look at these links, please drop us a line at community@openmrs.org (or simply reply to this message) and let us know if you have any questions about getting started. If you have an idea for something else, we’d like to hear more about it so we can help find you mentors and partners within the community. If you want to jump right into the community we recommend signing up for an OpenMRS ID (https://id.openmrs.org) and introducing yourself on Talk (Welcome! Please introduce yourself), our online community. Your OpenMRS ID will be your personal profile in the OpenMRS community, giving you access to engage and contribute in discussions on Talk, the online forum OpenMRS uses to communicate.
Thanks again for contacting us. We’re looking forward to hearing from you on IRC, on OpenMRS Talk, in one of our online meetings, or by e-mail. OpenMRS is community-driven and depends on the willingness of people like you to help make a difference in Health IT. We’re really happy to welcome you to our community, and look forward to working with you soon!
You can see the original auto response here.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how/if we can improve our introductory email.