OK, here are a few thoughts (consider them my planks for running if you like, even though that's not my intent). I see a lot of lurkers, and  a decent amount of people who want to join in Mageia but seem to be a little timid. I think we are attracting many first time contributors - which is awesome!! But Maybe a bit more hand holding or other infrastructure would work.

For example, when I joined the packaging team I was welcomed with open arms, given a mentor, and several places to go to ask questions. It was in a word, friggin sweet (ok that's 2 words)!

My point in all of this is I'd love to see something that gives the average user an "foot in the door" to working within Mageia. As much as I hate to admit it, this is one thing Ubuntu and to a lesser extent Fedora do very well.

This is the total brainstorming part but maybe it will get the ball rolling. Why not a mageia-users team/council seat? Marketing of the viral kind would be amazing for us, and who better to do that than excited and enthusiastic users? I'm not talking any pay for membership thing, but for a user to say, my application was accepted to the mageia-users team means something to many people. I don't pretend that any of these ideas are particularly good, but just some thinking I've been doing about bridging the gap between dev/teams/ and community.

I'd love to hear ideas and thoughts on this. With Mga 2 coming up, I'd love to see us making a splash with something more than just download and visit the forum once in awhile.

I agree and really everyone who uses Mageia is part of the community.

There are many ways people can contribute to Mageia without being on an official team for it. For example when I mentioned IRC cloaks on the Mageia discuss and marketing mailing lists, I mentioned how someone should be able to do a lot of Mageia support on IRC and then receive one. Well when Mageia has the IRC cloaks sorted out with Freenode this is.

With Ubuntu there's a guy who I assume still helps out a lot in the big IRC channel, and as far as I know all he did for Ubuntu or mainly, was IRC support, and as a result of becoming one of the main support people in the channel, he was able to become a Ubuntu Community Member and get the IRC cloak for example.

Another example of contributing to Mageia, but not really as part of an official team would be what I do with the #mageia-social channel. I build up the #mageia-social IRC channel, and welcome new users to the channel, and help keep people interested in the Mageia community. However really this is done as a team in a way with the other users of the channel who tend to chat there :), because people in general aren't likely to stick around for long, if not that much happens in there.

Someone who uses the channel has even donated money twice to Mageia, and he doesn't use the distribution at the moment, but he uses the #mageia-social channel :).

Mageia can also be mentioned and promoted on podcasts for example by people, be they on an official team for the project or not. In fact I went on a podcast for my first time as a guest, to talk about Mageia and Desktop Linux in general and so on last year, as I was slowly deciding what I wanted to do for Mageia other than IRC and Identica stuff, before I joined any official teams.

Took me quite a while to join any official teams, although I had been thinking about marketing for a rather long time here and there before I joined, and talked to Trish on IRC a few times about joining. Plus some stuff to do with the mailing lists and what email address I would use before I joined any teams.

Someone could make tutorial videos for doing things with Mageia just for fun for example and not be on any official team for Mageia.

Or someone could type blog posts every now and again about Mageia, because they like the distro and not be on any official teams for example.

Someone could also help to build up interest in person in their local area or country, and not be on any official Magiea teams, yep local communities. Oh and I suggest watching this video if haven't already seen it: http://video.fosdem.org/2012/crossdistro/Working_with_contributor_communities__round_table_.webm

Also someone could help to gain interest in Mageia on social networking sites and not be on any official teams.  I did that for a long time before joining any official teams using Identica, although that was mainly to make sure news would show in the Mageia group as well, but still: http://identi.ca/group/mageia

Really everyone who uses Mageia is part of the world wide users community :).

From Sebastian sebsebseb