Re: How to destroy your community
I thought I would post a snippet from the Endgadget review that represents the view of the users of Nokia's products. This is something that Nokia bears in mind, even if we at maemo.org don't always, we tend to be self-selecting geeks. After having dug in, we're seeing glimmers of brilliance here that give us hope. Maemo 5 isn't the polished, consumer-friendly, all-encompassing solution that Palm, Google, and Apple are all selling today, but it's fairly evident that Nokia has built itself a stable, extensible platform that can reach those levels with a little tender loving care. The company's commitment to open source and the Maemo development community is commendable -- it's something that should absolutely continue -- but going forward, we'd love to see what kinds of magical things could happen if it took development to 100 percent feature completion internally with a full round of usability testing before handing it off to the eager geeks in the field. The mere thought sends shivers down our spine. The important point here is that users want _less_ developer control and _more_ Nokia control. Any smart company listens to their users and Nokia is no exception. Regards, Jeremiah ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Jeremiah Foster jerem...@jeremiahfoster.com writes: engadget: ...company's commitment to open source and the Maemo development community is commendable -- it's something that should absolutely continue -- but going forward, we'd love to see what kinds of magical things could happen if it took development to 100 percent feature completion internally with a full round of usability testing before handing it off to the eager geeks in the field. The mere thought sends shivers down our spine. This ain't a rant at Nokia, but I don't think they have any commitment to open source. It's a huge corporate entity, and I've seen written somewhere something along the lines: the end users don't care about the system, they care about features. That's the corporate attitude any company has, IMO, and I think Nokia's management is of the same view. I.e. the end user doesn't care if the device runs on GNU/Linux, Symbian etc., they just want features and useability. And for the 99.99% of users I think this actually holds. Now, not for us, i.e. GNU/Linux is the only reason I bought this device, not for love of Nokia, or for some fantastic soft I thought they'd have on the phone, but rather because of the freedom, that you can really do almost anything you want as the phone is almost fully free... Anyhow, I think the reason that Nokia is continuing to develop the Maemo platform is that they must be thinking that the FLOSS community will help them make the system greater, thereby bringing in some amazing app/useability development, and then this'll reward them for investing into Maemo. I don't know what business logic that's based on, but these are guys in suits and ties, eh..., they usually make bandwagon decisions, what do you expect :O) Now in light of this, I think Jeff's original point holds very much true. I mean, throughout the past weeks I've been thinking: WTF, how can these amateurs maintaining the repositories (meaning Nokia Maemo people) get by with this. Now leaving aside the fact whether maemo.org is Nokia or not, it don't matter IMO. The conclusion to me is that Maemo still must be a fringe platform within Nokia to the extent that some corporate smartass is thinking, OK let's let these GNU/Linux geeks play in their little scratchbox, maybe something is gonna come out of it, but let's not devote lumps of corporate resources to this. And that's why this totally ridiculous state of the matters persists, i.e. servers down etc. Man, in fact, all of the Nokia defenders that have been getting on Jeff's case these past days, because of some tone of his letter or something (laugh out loud), have gently ignored the point, that he was the only guy who actually did something about it ever before starting this thread, i.e. starting his mirror of the repositories, which have enabled quite some developpers to actually use the device these past days. So I support his point strongly and am just surprised Nokia ain't reactin', maybe not to his criticism, but state of the matters, unless Maemo really is some fringe one or two-guys sideshow at Nokia. -- C уважением / 宜しく御願い致します / Best regards / S pozdravem / Z poważaniem / Mit freundlichen Grüßen 白い熊 ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Am Mittwoch, den 20.01.2010, 19:23 -0300 schrieb Jeff Moe: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team Cool, thanks. How does Tero Kojo, for example, fit into this picture? I (and apparently others) have a hard time figuring out what the hierarchy is here. Like the most excellent Quim Gil isn't there either. A nice chart with Ari Jaaski at the top would be most instructive. I disagree with the last sentence: I'm part of the maemo.org team but definitely not part of Nokia's Maemo Devices division (The maemo.org team and many people of Maemo Devices division are both part of the maemo.org community though). Such a chart would be misleading as I'm not integrated into Nokia's internal organization. andre -- Andre Klapper (maemo.org bugmaster) ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
-Original Message- From: maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org [mailto:maemo-developers- boun...@maemo.org] On Behalf Of Vollmer Marius (Nokia-D/Helsinki) Sent: 21 January, 2010 09:03 To: ext Dave Neary Cc: maemo-developers@maemo.org Subject: Re: How to destroy your community ext Dave Neary dne...@maemo.org writes: I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Dave, for effs sake, Joe is not trying to get something for him and he is not getting angry because he isn't getting it. Joe is pointing out opportunities for Maemo's improvement and he is getting irritated because we are not honest with ourselves and try to dismiss that there are problems to begin with[1]. There are problems sure, that bit is apparent. Do you really think any party (community, admins, ISP, me) is right now happy at how the ISP has handled the case? No. If anyone has a blade rack with roughly fifteen blades, a few teras of netapp and fast connections handy, and is willing to watch it 24/7, give root access and guarantee that it will be there for the next three to five years, please step forward. I would love to get that somewhere. But ranting on this list will not help. There is a process set up for community work (by the community) with the idea of monthly sprints (http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_Sprints). You want changes, you are more than welcome to the sprint meeting and take tasks to get things done. It is very easy for Joe to just go away or to shut up, without any loss to him. We should be happy that he doesn't, it would be a loss for us. He can do good for maemo.org, and I wouldn't be surprised if he can do more good than many of our paid sysapes. Get him root access already. Give root access to a person who walks in here and starts shouting? Are you serious? No smileys, so I assume you are. Marius, I want root access on all your machines. I want it, now! :) Also Marius, would you watch your language. Calling people names is rude. It gives a bad picture of your character, and is against netiquette. You should know better, it's not a kindergarten. Tero [1] And no, we are working hard to improving things is not good enough. Even the way we implement improvements needs to be improved. Please show up at the next monthly sprint meeting and take some tasks to improve things then. How much time and energy are you willing to pitch in personally? ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hi Tero, Am 21.01.2010 um 12:56 schrieb tero.k...@nokia.com tero.k...@nokia.com: There are problems sure, that bit is apparent. Do you really think any party (community, admins, ISP, me) is right now happy at how the ISP has handled the case? No. Well then, what is being done to make sure something like this doesn't happen again? And just for clarity: I don't see the ISP being the root cause of the problem here. The question is: how could roughly fifteen blades, a few teras of netapp end up at such a bad ISP? Isn't it common sense to use an ISP that one has prior experience with and hopefully a known contact? Who made this decision? Was that person fit (qualified) to make this decision? If not, is he still responsible for these kinds of decisions? If anyone has a blade rack with roughly fifteen blades, a few teras of netapp and fast connections handy, and is willing to watch it 24/7, give root access and guarantee that it will be there for the next three to five years, please step forward. I would love to get that somewhere. Getting that somewhere is obviously not the issue at all, for the right price. And I'm guessing money is not the issue either. So it's just about having someone who has experience and the right contacts in this regard to make the proper choice. But ranting on this list will not help. I don't think that I'm ranting. I'm trying to get to the root of the problem here. This might be an important discussion since it's possible not all of us agree about the root cause. It is very easy for Joe to just go away or to shut up, without any loss to him. We should be happy that he doesn't, it would be a loss for us. He can do good for maemo.org, and I wouldn't be surprised if he can do more good than many of our paid sysapes. Get him root access already. Give root access to a person who walks in here and starts shouting? Are you serious? No smileys, so I assume you are. Marius, I want root access on all your machines. I want it, now! :) Jeff was shouting? I would rather characterize him as one of the (if not the) most valued community contributors in regards to maemo.org infrastructure. Just take a look at http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba. He was the only one (!) being able to provide maemo.org repository access during the server move. I think he has proven that he is capable and can be trusted. So tell me Tero, what are the criteria for getting root access? Is this a community, i.e. a meritocracy? Also Marius, would you watch your language. Calling people names is rude. It gives a bad picture of your character, and is against netiquette. You should know better, it's not a kindergarten. Exactly, it is not. It's high time people started being accountable for their performance. Please show up at the next monthly sprint meeting and take some tasks to improve things then. How much time and energy are you willing to pitch in personally? I'll be there. How much responsibility are you willing to give away? Cheers, Stephan ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Kojo Tero (Nokia-D/Helsinki) tero.k...@nokia.com writes: Marius, I want root access on all your machines. I want it, now! :) Dude, after all this, I wouldn't even let you ride my bicycle. Also Marius, would you watch your language. Calling people names is rude. It gives a bad picture of your character, and is against netiquette. You should know better, it's not a kindergarten. Heh, are you referring to me saying many of our paid sysapes? That wasn't directed at anyone in particular, it was kind of a heat seeking missile. In any case, apologies if I hurt some people's feelings. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
Hello! Please show up at the next monthly sprint meeting and take some tasks to improve things then. How much time and energy are you willing to pitch in personally? (While not address to me). That is too simple. I'm developer, spending much of my free time in maemo related developing. I must be able to hint at problems and make suggestions without realizing them by myself. I know that this is a common open source problem (people always only want to make the nice stuff). But in the end people were nominated/paid/raised their hand to be responsible for something. I must be able to address tasks to these people, because for various reason they are or should be experts. And as long as these people exists I do not want the hear come there and offer help but I want to here Bullshit or I put it on the TODO list (and of course lets further disccuss). If positions are vacant or people have too much workload or there are urgent things to do adn help is required, this should be addressed, communicated and hopefully resolved (and also adressed to the community with request for help). It should also communicated if this breaks and TODO lists get to long to get handled anytime soon (something communities break at this point because all have ideas but nobody wants to do anything). Possibly I may take a job I feel confortable with in the end, but that should not stop me pointing at problems and increase the size of the TODO list. Do it yourself sound like a easy way to get rid of problems. -- Gruß... Tim ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
-Original Message- From: ext Stephan Jaensch [mailto:s...@sjaensch.org] Sent: 21 January, 2010 14:24 To: Kojo Tero (Nokia-D/Helsinki) Cc: maemo-developers mailing-list Subject: Re: How to destroy your community Hi Tero, Am 21.01.2010 um 12:56 schrieb tero.k...@nokia.com tero.k...@nokia.com: There are problems sure, that bit is apparent. Do you really think any party (community, admins, ISP, me) is right now happy at how the ISP has handled the case? No. Well then, what is being done to make sure something like this doesn't happen again? And just for clarity: I don't see the ISP being the root cause of the problem here. The question is: how could roughly fifteen blades, a few teras of netapp end up at such a bad ISP? Isn't it common sense to use an ISP that one has prior experience with and hopefully a known contact? Who made this decision? Was that person fit (qualified) to make this decision? If not, is he still responsible for these kinds of decisions? Large publicly listed companies have very strict rules when using money. There's even a law about it in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes_oxley) That has the implication that a listed company cannot buy from wherever, and that limits the choices considerably. To have some other instance run the servers would be perfect. However as stated somewhere earlier in this thread, there is no entity that could make legally binding contracts on behalf of the community. So the solution right now is to talk more to the ISP to get the issue fixed and make sure that they understand the nature of maemo.org (the site and the community). And point to the simple fact that the SLA has an uptime number which they themselves agreed to. Getting that somewhere is obviously not the issue at all, for the right price. And I'm guessing money is not the issue either. So it's just about having someone who has experience and the right contacts in this regard to make the proper choice. Somewhere is the issue. The list of places is limited. Contacts will not help. This naturally applies only to large publicly listed companies. I don't think that I'm ranting. I'm trying to get to the root of the problem here. This might be an important discussion since it's possible not all of us agree about the root cause. No you are making a good discussion. I appreciate it. But people's feelings seem to be generally running hot in this thread. Jeff was shouting? I would rather characterize him as one of the (if not the) most valued community contributors in regards to maemo.org infrastructure. Just take a look at http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba. He was the only one (!) being able to provide maemo.org repository access during the server move. I think he has proven that he is capable and can be trusted. I agree, Jeff is a guy who can do things. He definitely is nice to have around. Trusted, maybe you are right. I have no idea. Not my call either. So tell me Tero, what are the criteria for getting root access? Is this a community, i.e. a meritocracy? It is a community issue, you need to ask the community. Personally I do not have shell accounts (let alone root) on any maemo.org machine. I wouldn't deserve them, I'm not a sysadmin. And neither can I invent any good reason to ask for them. If you have been here long enough, you know that in the beginning (four-five years ago) maemo.org was pretty much run by Nokia. That all has been changing slowly but surely. And nowadays maemo.org is community run. Sure Nokia sponsors the servers, but as said there is no other entity to do that right now. it's not a kindergarten. Exactly, it is not. It's high time people started being accountable for their performance. Yes, that's why there are legal agreements called contracts in place. But those do not prevent technical failures, they only make sure that there are penalties for cases where things have not gone as agreed. And penalties do not generally make anyone happy. So the solution is to work more with the ISP to make sure they get things fixed and right. And the people who do admin work for the community are pretty much working their ass off right now, as they have for the past two months. I'm not quite sure everyone understands that there are about two people doing admin work in maemo.org, and what services the site has overall. Please show up at the next monthly sprint meeting and take some tasks to improve things then. How much time and energy are you willing to pitch in personally? I'll be there. How much responsibility are you willing to give away? Good to hear! Responsibility is not mine to give away. Ask the council, Niels or Ferenc at the meeting. I am sure there is no end of small tasks that could be done. Tero Cheers, Stephan ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo
RE: How to destroy your community
Large publicly listed companies have very strict rules when using money. There's even a law about it in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes_oxley) That has the implication that a listed company cannot buy from wherever, and that limits the choices considerably. I'm going to have to call BS on that one. Sarbanes-Oxley has absolutely nothing to do with whom you can do legitimate business. That law was created because some large companies had set up shell corporations to hide debt in to make their balance sheets look better. The law was designed to reform accounting practices by making corporate officers personally responsible for the accuracy of accounting records and financial reports. Ed Okerson ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Kojo Tero (Nokia-D/Helsinki) tero.k...@nokia.com writes: Large publicly listed companies have very strict rules when using money. There's even a law about it in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes_oxley) That has the implication that a listed company cannot buy from wherever, and that limits the choices considerably. Uhh, that doesn't bode well for ovi.com... :-) ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
2010/1/20 Aldon Hynes aldon.hy...@orient-lodge.com You can *demand*. You can also ask in a way that is likely to be more effective or join in a discussion about how we can all work together to make sure that we all get the best possible equipment and supporting infrastructure. Aldon I want to bump this point up. What has been said can't be taken back so this thing started with a wrong foot by using topic how to destroy your community and making all kinds of accusations even when you don't have a clue about the realities that apply to the server move is a starting point that won't give you anything useful. Conversation starter written in whole another tone would have been a superior choice. Please keep in mind, that if you want things to be improved, attacking takes you nowhere. And showing a little bit of symphaty instead of bashing doesn't make your points any less valid unless the points are totally wrong at the first place. Ossipena / Timo ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 12:39:39 Murray Cumming wrote: On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 08:43 -0300, Jeff Moe wrote: I don't have to be here for years to see how things are managed and where the problems are. Things are clearly in progress. It's apparently a move in the right direction, I'm not quite sure they are. Didn't the server just get moved *to* an ISP that can't fix NFS mounts on weekends? What ISP is this? even if it's not everything you want. How about letting it settle down just a little bit and then calmly suggesting how to avoid problems in future. People have been preaching patience (not just to me, to everyone) since I landed here and before. Why should we be patient? Why can't we demand things work like they do everywhere else? I'm sure google/apple would love for us to be patient for the next 3 years. I am sure that Tero and his colleagues would actually like ideas that reduce the awkward infrastructure work. I've already suggested *many* ways for things to be improved: * Copy Fedora Infrastructure Standard Operating Procedures, in which I track down a Fedora admin to get info, explain how they do things, and give links for more info: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023329.html http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023337.html * I also sent a list about the same issue to council, providing more info about how other distros handle such things. (offlist, but the council sent it to the list before checking with me). * I suggest using mirrors well before the most recent outage. Not only do I suggest it, I go on a actually set up a mirror, fully document how it is done in the maemo.org wiki, and give full root access to a Maemo admin. Later on this mirror is heavily used during a major maemo outage. I also within hours set up two additional mirror servers in distinct data centers: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023337.html http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023392.html http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023425.html http://espejo.freemoe.org/ http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Espejo http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Mirror * Suggest, and write a mini-howto about documenting server changes. It appears the maemo admin team cannot tell when or who has made changes to system configurations (!). http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023560.html * Wherein I discover that the SDK has been silently changed and suggest that version numbering be used: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023776.html This directly lead to this thread about how the SDKs should be set up, which is of course vitally important: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023781.html * Suggest moving DNS to someone other than Nokia, due to a major extended DNS outage (IMHO, this should *never* happen). This could be *easily* implemented and would greatly increase reliability of the entire infrastructure: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023805.html * Along with all that, I have frequently documented actual outages in what is currently the proper place for this. I believe my reports were good--in any case I asked if more info was needed and none was asked for. I even offered SSH access to confirm it. https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5818 Note, I haven't documented every single outage I've seen--there have been far more. In fact, *today* many people around the world are still reporting outages on talk.maemo.org. --- If I seem a little testy maybe it's because I've been told to be patient for way too long. Patience with a server outage should be measured in hours, not months. If maemo doesn't find a way to solve these problems, they will be crushed in the end. A blogger recently pointed out along the lines of mindshare is the marketshare of the future. Maemo is losing mindshare and developers due to these *continued* problems. I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. I once sent this analogy to someone: Nokia built a wonderful hockey stadium, great seats, boxes, huge LCD screens. They gave out free tickets to the the public and a free beer token to adults. The players got new uniforms, clean locker rooms, and top doctors. Then the athletes went to play, but the equipment manager gave them styrofoam
Re: How to destroy your community
Hi, Jeff Moe wrote: People have been preaching patience (not just to me, to everyone) since I landed here and before. Why should we be patient? Why can't we demand things work like they do everywhere else? I'm sure google/apple would love for us to be patient for the next 3 years. I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 15:54:53 Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Jeff Moe wrote: People have been preaching patience (not just to me, to everyone) since I landed here and before. Why should we be patient? Why can't we demand things work like they do everywhere else? I'm sure google/apple would love for us to be patient for the next 3 years. I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Well, they certainly started out as requests. I definitely am getting progressively louder though. Can you show me demanding in this? http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023363.html or this http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2010-January/023329.html or Do I need to dig up more posts, IRC logs, etc to show requests? Plus you're totally missing the point. The fact is things need to get sorted out, whether I exist or not. I've certainly offered plenty of paths for things to get fixed. The fastest way to get me to STFU is to get things working. ;) -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Really? That is the problem? The verb he used? First of all, demand is the right word. It works like this with any website on the interwebs. It's always a give and take. Every user *demands* that a website is stable and fast, wether they formulate that on a mailing list or not. They demand that the site works or they'll leave - because that's the imaginary contract a website owner has with his/her users. I'll provide you a service and you'll come back, generate content for me etc. pp. Now, Dave, if you don't care about Maemo's users (and I mean all kind of them - N900 end-users, FOSS developers, commercial developers), then you might have this attitude. Otherwise, you should be aware of this contract and thus realize why they have the right to demand a stable service - it's part of the payment for their time (which they could spend elsewhere). The other part of your payment is obviously some kind of service you provide them - if and when your servers run reliably. Welcome to the internet age. Second of all: he wrote a very insightful mail, highlighting many of the issues, mentioning the possible solutions he has suggested (and put on the maemo.org wiki) - and you decide to quote one sentence and comment on one verb he used. I think that is a very nice illustration of the *real* problem. Cheers, Stephan P.S., out of curiosity: are you being paid for the work you do for maemo.org? ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 15:54:53 you wrote: Hi, Jeff Moe wrote: People have been preaching patience (not just to me, to everyone) since I landed here and before. Why should we be patient? Why can't we demand things work like they do everywhere else? I'm sure google/apple would love for us to be patient for the next 3 years. I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Reflecting further: Why can't I *demand* as well? I so far have spent around $5,000 on N900s. Can't I, as an *end user*, demand a working repository as a minimum? This is what was advertised as part of Maemo/N900 package when I bought it. -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 16:20:35 Aldon Hynes wrote: You can *demand*. You can also ask in a way that is likely to be more effective or join in a discussion about how we can all work together to make sure that we all get the best possible equipment and supporting infrastructure. And which discussion would that be? I just searched the archives back to October and don't see any public discussion about the server infrastructure. Perhaps they are elsewhere. Everytime I asked about it previously (mostly in IRC), I was basically told to just sit and wait for them to sort things out. It's hard to offer much advice when there is basically zero public info about the server arrangement, but I have offered what I think to be good suggestions based on the anecdotal tidbits available. The discussions that do exist, I initiated. Or, how about instead of complaining about my tone you actually add something useful to the discussion? Do you have any suggestions, corrections, or improvements about any of my suggestions? There certainly must be some as I am only one admin. -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
Dave, I would totally side with Jeff on this one -- the whole infrastructure has been a issue for a while. I do NOT see the primary issues getting any better. Sure the servers seems to be faster; but obviously the load needs more people to be able to handle it in a timely fashion. The consistent servers issues have caused me a whole lot of grief. And I really, really hate having to post; the package is done, but the autobuilders are down or the package was built; but the autobuilders aren't moving it into extras-devel or it is in extras-devel but I can't promote it to testing. All three which I have had to write several times in the last couple weeks and most of them the issues persisted 48 hours! That's not even counting the myriad of other issues that are caused by the servers and/or the move. The problem is I believe that we (the users and developers) did have realistic expectations. A fairly seamless move between servers. I have moved a large community (Larger than Maemo is) between servers; and I wasn't down more than 20 minutes on some services -- and that was because I double checked certain thing manually just to make sure I didn't loose any messages on the high volume board -- since I allowed posting to continue up until the very last second, before I had it switch to the other server in the other facility. I even made sure that DNS had a temporary address for the new server; so that the old server could redirect to the new dns address if people still had the old dns somehow in their cache. I can't say I had any complaints at all about the move, most people probably didn't even realize it had happened (besides everything going way faster). I've also setup completely new servers to be a mirror of another very large site (also larger than Maemo), with identical content and wasn't down at all. These are realistically done, with little or NO down time. I never told my customers; oh sorry -- we choose an isp that sucks, can't do anything about it, wait a couple days and it might be working again for most of your users. I made sure my customers knew up front about any thing that could be an issue. That way if it was an issue; they knew about it -- but because of planning; none of them actually turned into issues. If there are problems to be expected; PRE-post about them, so that all the expectations are set realistically.For instance, take people having to discover that they have to move their git, svn, or even dput AFTER the fact; what a pita. It really should have been PRE-posted to the list: Hey, we had issues getting the old svn address working; you will be forced to change it to xyz.mameo.org It never should have been some poor person attempt to svn commit and get a redirect error message, and having to ask the list what is up. The problem that Jeff presents is that Maemo for all practical purposes is Nokia and the team is acting as such. I see no such accountability to the users of Maemo who rely on these services. I have no doubt they (the web team) are doing their job; it is just they apparently report to Nokia and not Maemo. So, we sure as hell have no idea what is going on until we ask: Why is x not working; and then later get back the response; yeah that is known -- it might be fixed later. If they had done any due diligence; they would have either known it would take a couple days to get things smooth again and pre-posted this to the group, tmo and setup a wiki page with status on each service. Or, they would have done the transference in a much, much more seamless manner, i.e. move over each service one at a time pre-test then redirect dns for just that service. Yes, some smaller issues may have occurred; but this move has been a disaster and I would say a decent case study in how _not_ to move a community to new servers. Nathan -Original Message- From: maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org [mailto:maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org] On Behalf Of Dave Neary Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 12:55 PM To: Jeff Moe Cc: maemo-developers@maemo.org Subject: Re: How to destroy your community Hi, Jeff Moe wrote: People have been preaching patience (not just to me, to everyone) since I landed here and before. Why should we be patient? Why can't we demand things work like they do everywhere else? I'm sure google/apple would love for us to be patient for the next 3 years. I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hello, Okay, so it's knives out is it? Fine. I have flame retardant underwear. :-) I know you want things to work smoothly, we all do. Believe me, the admins are working their butts off to make it so, they work long days and have been checking in on weekends too. I still see no reason for any personal attacks, it is not necessary. I will take responsibility for part of the server move - I think we all could have done better, but this is the situation we're in, and long lectures full of conjecture won't help much. Let's summarize the constructive criticism instead. 1. Maemo.org DNS should probably be on physically separate networks, with redundant servers worldwide. DyDNS can do this cheaply, there were other suggestions as well. 2. The maemo.org repositories should be mirrored in the free software community at places like Ibiblio or similar, to provide a measure of redundancy. 3. Whatever ISP is chosen to host the site should feel like a stakeholder in the success of the maemo community. They should feel motivated for things to work 24/7. 4. The community should be allowed to help with the infrastructure. Perhaps some services should be entirely released to the community? Or maybe start using community resources like the SuSE OBS? 5. Greater communication and transparency from the maemo staff. If I have missed anything I am sure you'll let me know, in no uncertain terms. ;) And now for some return fire: patience is a virtue. This means that throwing a temper tantrum on a mailing list gets you often branded as a poisonous person, to quote from your original link. That seems really unnecessary since many of those on this list who are flaming have valid points and obviously care about the community. The valid points come across when they are delivered politely too, so I ask for that to be the default setting. We are where we are, and being impatient won't change that. Regards, Jeremiah ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
And which discussion would that be? Gee, Jeff, I don't know. Aren't mirrors part of the server infrastructure? I seem to recall a recent discussion about mirrors. Discussions about the mailing list being down, SVN moving, and R.M.O being down all fit, at least in my mind as part of the disucssions about server infrastructure as well. Or, how about instead of complaining about my tone you actually add something useful to the discussion? I'm sorry that my suggestion that the tone of comment here might be impeding making progress in addressing the important issues of this list isn't considered useful for you. Based on that, I suspect none of my other suggestions are likely to be considered useful either. Do you have any suggestions, corrections, or improvements about any of my suggestions? Yes, but I suspect you won't find them useful. While I've been a computer programmer for over forty years, the past several years have been focused primarily as an activist and community organizer. The reason I am particularly interested in the N900 as a mobile device and Maemo as a platform is that it has the potential to be a great platform for community development. However, that is unlikely to happen if people spend their time griping about how Nokia is not taking their concerns seriously enough instead of working on building a strong sufficient standalone community. If you want Nokia to run the community, keep demanding that they do things and don't take initiative on your own. I'm pleased that Jeff took the initiative to create his mirror and to talk about it. That is the sort of initiative that needs to be taken. However, for these initiatives to really work, they must be accompanied by coalition building. Griping about Nokia not doing enough probably is not the most effective form of coalition building. Instead, if you feel the repositories are substandard, build a coalition of repository mirror owners. Push it even further, if you get enough focus and power, to become the alternative repository where the really good developers work together. If you feel that the developers mailing list isn't meeting your needs, set up your own mailing list. The same for the Wiki. If you think there is something fundamentally flawed with the debian style of distributing packages, create your own distribution environment based on RPMs or some other distribution methodology. As it stands now, in spite of problems that have occured with the mailing list and the repositories, I'm pretty happy to keep using the tools that now exist. I don't have a pressing need to create something other or better. Me? I'm still learning my way around Nokia, N900, Maemo and the various community surrounding them. I do not know enough of the players or issues yet to start my own organizing here yet. However, I have been speaking with folks at various open source companies to get ideas about how to make the community here more effective and cohesive. When I get a chance, I'll be writing up more about this on my blog, but right now there are political, work, and family issues taking a higher priority. Aldon http://www.orient-lodge.com ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 18:17:30 Jeremiah Foster wrote: 1. Maemo.org DNS should probably be on physically separate networks, with redundant servers worldwide. DyDNS can do this cheaply, there were other suggestions as well. Yes, would be very nice. Then the admins wouldn't have to wait for Nokia to make the changes (which appear to be very slow) and could just do it themselves directly. With DirectNIC (and likely most others), you can even set the TTL in a *web form*. So days in advance the TTL could be set to one hour, so in worst case that would be the longest people would keep stale data in their caches. Click click! Done. 2. The maemo.org repositories should be mirrored in the free software community at places like Ibiblio or similar, to provide a measure of redundancy. Yes. First step in this is to set up an rsync server. I have a sample config here: http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Espejo#rsync I also think that database dumps (say weekly) should be done of the wiki and be available for download. I can dig up a SQL command (e.g. that leaves out user/pass info) if you want. This way others can make backups and then it could also be used with (the very cool) offline mediawiki viewer evopedia. Basically, if infrastructure data can be put in an easily downloadable format for copying, it should be. The more copies downloaded, the better. :) 3. Whatever ISP is chosen to host the site should feel like a stakeholder in the success of the maemo community. They should feel motivated for things to work 24/7. Definitely. /me takes third swing: and just who is this ISP right now? I know akamai is in the picture, but apparently someone else is hosting the main part (e.g. the NFS/SAN ISP). I wouldn't even go as far as say they should be a stakeholder, they just need to provide industry standard quality. Any ISP that isn't motivated 24/7 should be dropped. I think one extended outage of the nature we saw over the weekend is enough even (e.g. the hunt for a new ISP should begin immediately). 4. The community should be allowed to help with the infrastructure. Perhaps some services should be entirely released to the community? Or maybe start using community resources like the SuSE OBS? The first part of this would be to document what is there already. Also, document the current procedures (publicly--the IRC logs seem to indicate there is an internal Nokia wiki with this info). I have a feeling if the server move procedures had been public, lots of good suggestions would have been made by the various sysadmins on this list (e.g. it appears they didn't even think about changing DNS TTLs--surely many on this list would have caught that). We apparently have people on this list who have managed projects even larger than Maemo--their experience should clearly be leveraged. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow applies here too. 5. Greater communication and transparency from the maemo staff. Definitely. Each move needs to be announced somewhere. For developer issues (e.g. the builder, anything to do with SSH keys, etc.), this list seems an appropriate place. For another announcements (e.g. the server move in general) perhaps talk.maemo.org would be best in some stickied thread until the move is over. Qaiku I think is about the worst place, as for anyone to followup they need to get yet another account and there isn't really a good mechanism for discussion in short tweets. One excellent ISP I use has a dedicated list to this--for example see: http://frii.com/support/fta/ Also, perhaps I'm missing it, but it seems really hard to even figure out who the maemo staff is. Perhap I'm missing the obvious wiki page with this info (ala http://wiki.maemo.org/People ). Who is the paid maemo staff? Sincerely, your unpaid paying customer, -Jeff Moe http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hey, On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Jeff Moe m...@blagblagblag.org wrote: On Wednesday 20 January 2010 18:17:30 Jeremiah Foster wrote: 1. Maemo.org DNS should probably be on physically separate networks, with redundant servers worldwide. DyDNS can do this cheaply, there were other suggestions as well. Yes, would be very nice. Then the admins wouldn't have to wait for Nokia to make the changes (which appear to be very slow) and could just do it themselves directly. With DirectNIC (and likely most others), you can even set the TTL in a *web form*. So days in advance the TTL could be set to one hour, so in worst case that would be the longest people would keep stale data in their caches. Click click! Done. 2. The maemo.org repositories should be mirrored in the free software community at places like Ibiblio or similar, to provide a measure of redundancy. Yes. First step in this is to set up an rsync server. I have a sample config here: http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Espejo#rsync I also think that database dumps (say weekly) should be done of the wiki and be available for download. I can dig up a SQL command (e.g. that leaves out user/pass info) if you want. This way others can make backups and then it could also be used with (the very cool) offline mediawiki viewer evopedia. Basically, if infrastructure data can be put in an easily downloadable format for copying, it should be. The more copies downloaded, the better. :) 3. Whatever ISP is chosen to host the site should feel like a stakeholder in the success of the maemo community. They should feel motivated for things to work 24/7. Definitely. /me takes third swing: and just who is this ISP right now? I know akamai is in the picture, but apparently someone else is hosting the main part (e.g. the NFS/SAN ISP). I wouldn't even go as far as say they should be a stakeholder, they just need to provide industry standard quality. Any ISP that isn't motivated 24/7 should be dropped. I think one extended outage of the nature we saw over the weekend is enough even (e.g. the hunt for a new ISP should begin immediately). 4. The community should be allowed to help with the infrastructure. Perhaps some services should be entirely released to the community? Or maybe start using community resources like the SuSE OBS? The first part of this would be to document what is there already. Also, document the current procedures (publicly--the IRC logs seem to indicate there is an internal Nokia wiki with this info). I have a feeling if the server move procedures had been public, lots of good suggestions would have been made by the various sysadmins on this list (e.g. it appears they didn't even think about changing DNS TTLs--surely many on this list would have caught that). We apparently have people on this list who have managed projects even larger than Maemo--their experience should clearly be leveraged. Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow applies here too. 5. Greater communication and transparency from the maemo staff. Definitely. Each move needs to be announced somewhere. For developer issues (e.g. the builder, anything to do with SSH keys, etc.), this list seems an appropriate place. For another announcements (e.g. the server move in general) perhaps talk.maemo.org would be best in some stickied thread until the move is over. Qaiku I think is about the worst place, as for anyone to followup they need to get yet another account and there isn't really a good mechanism for discussion in short tweets. One excellent ISP I use has a dedicated list to this--for example see: http://frii.com/support/fta/ Also, perhaps I'm missing it, but it seems really hard to even figure out who the maemo staff is. Perhap I'm missing the obvious wiki page with this info (ala http://wiki.maemo.org/People ). Who is the paid maemo staff? http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team Best regards, -- Valério Valério http://www.valeriovalerio.org Sincerely, your unpaid paying customer, -Jeff Moe http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
Jeremiah, Okay, so it's knives out is it? Fine. I have flame retardant underwear. :-) I think you just lost the battle; knives against flame retardant underwear; the knife wins. ;-D I know you want things to work smoothly, we all do. Believe me, the admins are working their butts off to make it so, they work long days and have been checking in on weekends too. I still see no reason for any personal attacks, it is not necessary. I don't recall seeing any personal attacks (but then my wife says I don't read between the lines very well either), in fact I've tried to make sure that I put in my messages that I realize you are all working probably long and hard. I do realize you are working hard, and we are where we are because none of this was discussed before. And some flaming is coming because there is no pre-emptive communication. So maybe you should ask for additional help. I can manage servers; everything from install to actual programming; both Linux and Windows servers, and I've played with BSD, and a couple other *nix's.Jeff apparently has some skills in this area also. Tap the community, it is supposed to be community servers. ;-D 3. Whatever ISP is chosen to host the site should feel like a stakeholder in the success of the maemo community. They should feel motivated for things to work 24/7. Actually, the problem is that this isp must be very small; which then means they are not well staffed. They really don't have to be part of the community. They just have to offer the services to make sure the community isn't going to suffer on failures. At this point, the unability to fix a nfs point over the weekend does not inspire any sort of confidence that they will be able to fix anything major. My recommendation is more a move to a Teir 1 or 2 class host, not some two bit host.I'm a two bit host on my personal projects (its only me), but the facility I host my servers through is a Tier 1. I'm notified of all issues on all my servers (multiple ways). My uptime is somewhere close to 99.9% on all the servers, and pretty much any downtime is self inflicted. ;-)I have to imagine that Nokia is probably spending a lot more than what I do for my servers, since I'm cheap! Not meant as an attack, but, why aren't we in a tier 1/2 facility? 4. The community should be allowed to help with the infrastructure. Perhaps some services should be entirely released to the community? Or maybe start using community resources like the SuSE OBS? 5. Greater communication and transparency from the maemo staff. Agreed. If I have missed anything I am sure you'll let me know, in no uncertain terms. ;) Lol, watch the knives come To bad your wearing flame resistant underwear. I'd rather have the armor in a knife fight. ;-D Nathan ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. Maemo is a trademark owned by Nokia and used for their software platform and their products. You're confusing Maemo and maemo.org (maemo.org being the community-owned website). In doing so, you're confusing the discussion and making it much more difficult to participate and arrive at a useful conclusion. Maemo and maemo.org are not equivalent interchangeable terms. Thanks. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 19:01:01 Valerio Valerio wrote: Also, perhaps I'm missing it, but it seems really hard to even figure out who the maemo staff is. Perhap I'm missing the obvious wiki page with this info (ala http://wiki.maemo.org/People ). Who is the paid maemo staff? http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team Cool, thanks. How does Tero Kojo, for example, fit into this picture? I (and apparently others) have a hard time figuring out what the hierarchy is here. Like the most excellent Quim Gil isn't there either. A nice chart with Ari Jaaski at the top would be most instructive. Gotta run. Will point out that Jeff=Jeff later, perhaps! -Jeff, switching hemispheres http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Jan 20, 2010, at 23:21, Ryan Abel wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. Maemo is a trademark owned by Nokia and used for their software platform and their products. You're confusing Maemo and maemo.org (maemo.org being the community-owned website). In doing so, you're confusing the discussion and making it much more difficult to participate and arrive at a useful conclusion. Maemo and maemo.org are not equivalent interchangeable terms. Nor are they as distinct as you would imply. Jeremiah ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hi, Jeff Moe wrote: Also, perhaps I'm missing it, but it seems really hard to even figure out who the maemo staff is. Perhap I'm missing the obvious wiki page with this info (ala http://wiki.maemo.org/People ). Who is the paid maemo staff? Right up at the top of the People page: The maemo.org team - these are the people working on maemo.org: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team There are also some people working for Nemein who work on various aspects of maemo.org at different times - Ferenc, Rambo, Neithan, Henri, ... Most of these are either present or mentioned in the monthly IRC meetings we hold: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_Sprints cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 19:21:18 Ryan Abel wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. Maemo is a trademark owned by Nokia and used for their software platform and their products. You're confusing Maemo and maemo.org (maemo.org being the community-owned website). In doing so, you're confusing the discussion and making it much more difficult to participate and arrive at a useful conclusion. Maemo and maemo.org are not equivalent interchangeable terms. Yep! Definitely confusing them. They do seem much one and the same to me though. It seems we've come to some useful conclusions, regardless Though how does the community own maemo.org? I mean, can we really just walk off with it and leave Nokia behind? I doubt it. Can we see the finances of this website, please? -Jeff, really gotta run! ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Jan 20, 2010, at 5:26 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: On Wednesday 20 January 2010 19:21:18 Ryan Abel wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. Maemo is a trademark owned by Nokia and used for their software platform and their products. You're confusing Maemo and maemo.org (maemo.org being the community-owned website). In doing so, you're confusing the discussion and making it much more difficult to participate and arrive at a useful conclusion. Maemo and maemo.org are not equivalent interchangeable terms. Yep! Definitely confusing them. They do seem much one and the same to me though. It seems we've come to some useful conclusions, regardless Though how does the community own maemo.org? I mean, can we really just walk off with it and leave Nokia behind? I doubt it. Can we see the finances of this website, please? Yes, we could walk off with it and move it elsewhere if we had consensus to do so. $$$ is always a sensitive topic and not one that is widely advertised even in the most Free of Free Software projects. Especially not when corporate sponsors are involved. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
Yet perhaps this is some of the problem. It seems like the community of people working with devices running Maemo might be better served if it was more distinct. As is noted on the maemo.org Terms of Use page, the site is hosted as a 'public service' by Nokia Corporation. IMHO, what would make much more sense would be if 1) An independent open source community gets established, as a seperate not for profit legal entity. 2) Nokia contributes a few things to that community, including the Maemo trademark, so that the community could call itself Maemo, and the amount of money that Nokia spends on hosting the site and other community related activities. 3) The community, itself, could then run Maemo, including the websites, etc. My two cents, Aldon -Original Message- From: maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org [mailto:maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org]on Behalf Of Jeremiah Foster Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:23 PM To: Ryan Abel Cc: maemo-developers mailing-list Subject: Re: How to destroy your community On Jan 20, 2010, at 23:21, Ryan Abel wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Jeff Moe wrote: I've seen frequent mentions of how distinct maemo.org is from Nokia. But the reality seems that nothing at Maemo can really happen without Nokia's tacit approval. Is there anyone that has server access that isn't paid (directly or indirectly) by Nokia? Can we start getting the servers admin'd by community admins instead of depending upon Nokia? A first step would be to document (on the *outside/public*) wiki the current server arrangement. Another good step would be to get DNS off their servers. Until that happens, the whole maemo is distinct from Nokia is just a façade. Maemo is a trademark owned by Nokia and used for their software platform and their products. You're confusing Maemo and maemo.org (maemo.org being the community-owned website). In doing so, you're confusing the discussion and making it much more difficult to participate and arrive at a useful conclusion. Maemo and maemo.org are not equivalent interchangeable terms. Nor are they as distinct as you would imply. Jeremiah ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Jan 20, 2010, at 5:29 PM, Aldon Hynes wrote: Yet perhaps this is some of the problem. It seems like the community of people working with devices running Maemo might be better served if it was more distinct. As is noted on the maemo.org Terms of Use page, the site is hosted as a 'public service' by Nokia Corporation. The legal pages on maemo.org are rather unclear, as most of them haven't been updated since the branding redesign in 2008. IMHO, what would make much more sense would be if 1) An independent open source community gets established, as a seperate not for profit legal entity. You mean maemo.org is established as a separate legal entity. This one's been discussed a couple of times in the past. I'm all in favor. 2) Nokia contributes a few things to that community, including the Maemo trademark, so that the community could call itself Maemo, and the amount of money that Nokia spends on hosting the site and other community related activities. The Maemo trademark is a Nokia trademark that's used in the branding of their Linux software platform and the devices that run it. We already have a community trademark that has a logo and everything (not something Maemo can claim): maemo.org. 3) The community, itself, could then run Maemo, including the websites, etc. ERROR: undefined Maemo ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Wed, January 20, 2010 3:54 pm Jeff Moe wrote: Definitely. /me takes third swing: and just who is this ISP right now? I know akamai is in the picture, but apparently someone else is hosting the main part (e.g. the NFS/SAN ISP). I wouldn't even go as far as say they should be a stakeholder, they just need to provide industry standard quality. Any ISP that isn't motivated 24/7 should be dropped. I think one extended outage of the nature we saw over the weekend is enough even (e.g. the hunt for a new ISP should begin immediately). Not really that hard to figure out: (abbreviated cut and paste) $ dig www.maemo.org ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.maemo.org. 41354 IN CNAME maemo.org. maemo.org. 42736 IN A 80.248.164.250 $ whois 80.248.164.250 inetnum:80.248.164.224 - 80.248.164.255 netname:FI-BILIA descr: Logica Finland Oy / Datacentre services country:FI role: Logica Finland Hostmaster remarks:Logica Finland Oy LIR role address:Logica Finland Oy address:P.O.BOX 38 address:FIN-00381 Helsinki phone: +35810302010 (Wild ass guess follows) $ whois logica.fi domain: logica.fi descr:Logica Suomi oy descr:03575029 address: Hannu Honkala address: Karvaamokuja 2 address: 00380 address: HELSINKI phone:+358 10-302010 (phone numbers match, damn my guesses are good). Open web browser and go to http://www.logica.fi/ pick the flag in the upper right corner and choose a country you can read the language of. Ed Okerson ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
ext Dave Neary dne...@maemo.org writes: I guess that the problem is that you demand rather than request. Dave, for effs sake, Joe is not trying to get something for him and he is not getting angry because he isn't getting it. Joe is pointing out opportunities for Maemo's improvement and he is getting irritated because we are not honest with ourselves and try to dismiss that there are problems to begin with[1]. It is very easy for Joe to just go away or to shut up, without any loss to him. We should be happy that he doesn't, it would be a loss for us. He can do good for maemo.org, and I wouldn't be surprised if he can do more good than many of our paid sysapes. Get him root access already. [1] And no, we are working hard to improving things is not good enough. Even the way we implement improvements needs to be improved. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Marius Vollmer marius.voll...@nokia.com writes: Dave, for effs sake, Joe ^^^ It's Jeff of course. Sorry, I blame the lack of coffee. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: LCA: How to destroy your community
ext Jeff Moe m...@blagblagblag.org writes: Here is a good article in LWN about a presentation by Josh Berkus. How many of these points apply to Nokia? I'm afraid way too many. Maybe, but I find it also interesting how many points do _not_ apply. Maemo - it could be so much worse :-) ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
-Original Message- From: maemo-developers-boun...@maemo.org [mailto:maemo-developers- boun...@maemo.org] On Behalf Of ext Jeff Moe Sent: 19 January, 2010 01:41 To: maemo-developers@maemo.org Subject: LCA: How to destroy your community Here is a good article in LWN about a presentation by Josh Berkus. How many of these points apply to Nokia? I'm afraid way too many. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/370157/2a06baf10df8e58a/ Good read! Some gems: 1) It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find. Jeff, you have been hanging around here for what, 2 months? And those two months have been the time in which this place has seen it's biggest growth of all time. Sure that made the system break in the corners, but it's being fixed. Hang around for a couple of more years and then come back with the statistics. 3) There should be no useful information about the code, build methods, the patch submission process, the release process, or anything else. Then, when people ask for help, tell them to RTFM. 4) Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. 5) Employ large amounts of legalese. 7) Keep the decision-making powers unclear 8) Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything; 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. If you start a discussion in a tone of voice that is asking for a fight, we often disregard the discussion. We aren't here to pick fights, but to try and do something productive. You do get many things done, but your communication style isn't polite. I do understand that controversy can bring about change, but it can also polarize situations. Tero -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Jan 19, 2010, at 10:13 AM, tero.k...@nokia.com tero.k...@nokia.com wrote: Some gems: 1) It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find. As maemo transitions to a much larger server farm, there have been hiccups. The site has been slow, but has recently gotten significantly faster, in certain parts. Tero is right though, you just haven't been here long enough to have a reliable sample of uptime vs. downtime with regards to maemo.org. 3) There should be no useful information about the code, build methods, the patch submission process, the release process, or anything else. Then, when people ask for help, tell them to RTFM. I dismiss this out of hand. Yes there are places where things could be better documented, but there is a huge body of documentation out there, much of it well written and openly editable. 4) Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. 5) Employ large amounts of legalese. 7) Keep the decision-making powers unclear Unfortunately a bit of this is true. But this is part of maemo's dual nature, the half-closed, half-open beastie. To be honest, in a project like debian the entire infrastructure is open to debian developers so there is no closed-door, no cabal. Maemo could do better here. 8) Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything; You'll have to point to some evidence for this to apply to maemo. The only license changes I have noted are those that go from closed to open, stuff from TI for example. (Thanks again keepsie!) 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. If you start a discussion in a tone of voice that is asking for a fight, we often disregard the discussion. We aren't here to pick fights, but to try and do something productive. You do get many things done, but your communication style isn't polite. I do understand that controversy can bring about change, but it can also polarize situations. Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-) (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ -- More non-silence.) Jeremiah As a post script I will add that the maemo community is one of the friendliest communities I have been involved with on the interwebs. Of course the two communities I regularly lurk in, debian and perl, are a bit notorious, but maemo is genuinely friendly. There is plenty of room for criticism, just try to be polite so that the tenor and tone remain positive enough for people to get work done and not get distracted by pejorative attacks. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
ext Jeremiah Foster wrote: 4) Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. 5) Employ large amounts of legalese. 7) Keep the decision-making powers unclear Unfortunately a bit of this is true. But this is part of maemo's dual nature, the half-closed, half-open beastie. To be honest, in a project like debian the entire infrastructure is open to debian developers so there is no closed-door, no cabal. Maemo could do better here. In the end Nokia is expecting to create - and sell! - Maemo based products. So some choices are product driven and unfortunately cannot be communicated / discussed publicly. However some community members have already been involved in testing the recent upgrades before the release, so maybe what could happen in the future is that there could be a larger involvement of people who are not Nokia employees but agree to sign NDAs for being part of early discussions. A similar example comes from the kernel community, where a pool of kernel developers is willing to sing NDAs with industrial players to have access to device documentations and create/improve kernel drivers. igor ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 07:13:30 Jeremiah Foster wrote: 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-) (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ -- More non-silence.) Actually, when I cut and pasted that article snippit I was thinking about his blog *specifically*. AFAICT he has the highest position in Nokia with respect to the Maemo project (correct me if I'm wrong plz). He has a whopping 5 blog posts since the device has been out. His karma in maemo.org is 100% based on his blog posts. He gets asked lots of questions in the blog comments, but rarely answers. Since the N900 has been out, I see he only answered two comments, one of which was mine. ;) The other comment he replied to starts like this: Is there any reason why all my contact attempts with you, Mr. Makkinen and other Maemo people at Nokia are being ignored? ... Excuse me for posting it this way, but what else am I supposed to do if all I get in exchange for my emails is delivery confirmations? I wonder if he ever got a response. Blogs are often used as two way communication tools, he uses it for the occasional edict or a marketing promotion tool. -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On tis, 2010-01-19 at 12:10 +0100, ext Jeff Moe wrote: On Tuesday 19 January 2010 07:13:30 Jeremiah Foster wrote: 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-) (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ -- More non-silence.) Actually, when I cut and pasted that article snippit I was thinking about his blog *specifically*. AFAICT he has the highest position in Nokia with respect to the Maemo project (correct me if I'm wrong plz). He has a whopping 5 blog posts since the device has been out. His karma in maemo.org is 100% based on his blog posts. He gets asked lots of questions in the blog comments, but rarely answers. Since the N900 has been out, I see he only answered two comments, one of which was mine. ;) The other comment he replied to starts like this: Is there any reason why all my contact attempts with you, Mr. Makkinen and other Maemo people at Nokia are being ignored? ... Excuse me for posting it this way, but what else am I supposed to do if all I get in exchange for my emails is delivery confirmations? I wonder if he ever got a response. Blogs are often used as two way communication tools, he uses it for the occasional edict or a marketing promotion tool. So, what you're saying is that you acknowledge that Ari is the highest ranking person within Maemo. Then you are surprised that he doesn't have time to answer random comments made on his blog... Regards: David Weinehall ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 06:13:00 tero.k...@nokia.com wrote: Some gems: 1) It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find. Jeff, you have been hanging around here for what, 2 months? And those two months have been the time in which this place has seen it's biggest growth of all time. Sure that made the system break in the corners, but it's being fixed. I've had my device for 1200 hours so far (50 days). For how many of those hours have the various services been down? I'm not sure everything has ever been working for a full complete day. Break in the corners? That's quite a gloss. We've heard for quite some time (months before I came) about the big server move. Is this done? AFAICT, the servers have been moved and the new system is set up with tweaks being done (such as akamai serving gunzipped files!). Correct me if I'm wrong, and I hope I am, but it appears the servers have been moved to an ISP that cannot fix a broken NFS mount on the weekend. Is this really the situation? How on earth did maemo get stuck with this ISP? Who are they, in fact? It also looks like maemo.org DNS depends upon Nokia's nameservers. Apart from the NFS problems over the weekend, DNS resolution was also awry. Is there no one to fix DNS issues at Nokia on weekends? Is this really why DNS was down for so long? That can hardly be blamed on growth. A small pentium could keep up with maemo DNS requests. This is a problem of design and procedure, not of growth. DNS nowadays is often as simple as filling in a web form. This isn't rocket science. Perhaps it's time to move maemo.org DNS out of Nokia's hands and to a separate provider. There are likely hundreds that will provide better service than Nokia. I recommend DirectNIC since they were able to withstand, with zero downtime, hurricane Katrina from downtown New Orleans, but there are many many providers that could handle it. Hang around for a couple of more years and then come back with the statistics. Do you have any statistics for 2009? Would you be willing to share them? Do you realize even if you run things perfectly 100% for the rest of 2010 you have zero chance of 99.9% uptime (a reasonable baseline)? So I'll have to wait until 2011 statistics til the servers are more in line with industry expectations. A few admins commented in threads about the outage along the line of if something is down, we work non-stop until it is back up or even we'd be laid off if this happend at work. It seems that attitude is lacking with respect to maemo. During the most recent outage, I was able to provision an entirely new server and have a fresh OS install on a second one while on vacation in the mountains with a seriously crap wifi connection, yet no one in all of maemo/nokia was able to do anything to alleviate the outages? I don't have to be here for years to see how things are managed and where the problems are. -Jeff Moe http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
2010/1/19 Jeff Moe m...@blagblagblag.org I don't have to be here for years to see how things are managed and where the problems are. -Jeff Moe http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba Nope, but it would be good for you so that you can see the bigger picture. This was second time to me when repos didn't work if my memory doesn't betray me. So since 2008 and two times out of n repos were malfunctioning. Shocking. Ossipena / Timo ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 08:20:42 David Weinehall wrote: On tis, 2010-01-19 at 12:10 +0100, ext Jeff Moe wrote: On Tuesday 19 January 2010 07:13:30 Jeremiah Foster wrote: 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-) (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ -- More non-silence.) Actually, when I cut and pasted that article snippit I was thinking about his blog *specifically*. AFAICT he has the highest position in Nokia with respect to the Maemo project (correct me if I'm wrong plz). He has a whopping 5 blog posts since the device has been out. His karma in maemo.org is 100% based on his blog posts. He gets asked lots of questions in the blog comments, but rarely answers. Since the N900 has been out, I see he only answered two comments, one of which was mine. ;) The other comment he replied to starts like this: Is there any reason why all my contact attempts with you, Mr. Makkinen and other Maemo people at Nokia are being ignored? ... Excuse me for posting it this way, but what else am I supposed to do if all I get in exchange for my emails is delivery confirmations? I wonder if he ever got a response. Blogs are often used as two way communication tools, he uses it for the occasional edict or a marketing promotion tool. So, what you're saying is that you acknowledge that Ari is the highest ranking person within Maemo. I take that as a confirmation. Then you are surprised that he doesn't have time to answer random comments made on his blog... I wouldn't say I'm surprised. I can't find anywhere in the *.maemo.org space where he is interacting with folks. For instance, take an *ideal* project leader like Linus. If he had a blog, he might not answer random blog comments, but there's another mechanism for communicating with him, most prominently LKML. So there is two way communication. My point with the blog is that it's almost entirely one way with the community. Perhaps he's on some list or something I've overlooked--if so, please correct me. -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
2010/1/19 Jeff Moe m...@blagblagblag.org: I wouldn't say I'm surprised. I can't find anywhere in the *.maemo.org space where he is interacting with folks. For instance, take an *ideal* project leader like Linus. If he had a blog... He has: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hi Jeff, Jeff Moe wrote: I've had my device for 1200 hours so far (50 days). For how many of those hours have the various services been down? I'm not sure everything has ever been working for a full complete day. Break in the corners? That's quite a gloss. You could accomplish a lot more by rattling fewer cages. You've known this community for 50 days. Rather than rubbishing the work which everyone has done on this project *before* you arrived, you could criticise a little less frequently, tone down the sabre rattling, and in general be a bit nicer. This has never been a community where he who shouts loudest gets his way - please don't try to turn it into one. Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Dnia wtorek, 19 stycznia 2010 o 12:57:32 Jeff Moe napisał(a): For instance, take an ideal project leader like Linus. If he had a blog Linus Torvalds has a blog and posts there. http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ Regards, -- JID: h...@jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 10:00:51 Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote: Dnia wtorek, 19 stycznia 2010 o 12:57:32 Jeff Moe napisał(a): For instance, take an ideal project leader like Linus. If he had a blog Linus Torvalds has a blog and posts there. http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ Haha! And he even occassionally responds to comments there too! (More than Maemo's leader.) Like I said, *ideal* ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/370157/2a06baf10df8e58a/ Interesting! My personal take: 1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools Improving 2: Encourage the presence of poisonous people and maximize the damage that they can create. sense of humourNow this makes me wonder whether I should be putting my time in this reply... politically correct smiley ;) /politically correct smiley/sense of humour 3: Provide no documentation. Actually our problem is to organize well all the documentation available. Improving. 4: Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. True in many cases. Half of them come from the fact of having to run a profitable business in a very competitive sector. The other half comes from an inertia, consequence of the same business reason. Improving. 5: Employ large amounts of legalese. Nokia has legalese for the Nokia actions and products. For the Maemo community we have very light http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_contribution_guidelines and little else. We have used NDAs with community members only to give them access to secret hardware, as per suggestion of the own community. 6: The community liaison must be chosen carefully. It has been chosen carefully, indeed. ;) Jokes apart, we have a rich community liasion including several Nokia members (some of them appointed, some of them at their own risk) specialized in their areas and, in the other end, an elected Council and a professional maemo.org development team. 7: Governance obfuscation. You might or might not agree on the part governed by Nokia, but it's clearly formulated. The community governance is decently clear and documented imho. 8: Screw around with licensing. For the feedback received it looks like the LGPL based licensing makes happy a majority of community commercial developers. Now even Qt is LGPL. Note that a % of legalese Nokia has is precisely to make sure that we act properly with licenses. 9: Do not allow anybody outside the company to have commit access, ever. Basically true for the components copyrighted by Nokia, even if there is a grey area with e.g. Hildon or Modest. On the other hand Maemo is made of hundreds of components where no Nokia developer has commits rights. I believe we have to solve other problems before this one e.g. increasing the code contributions in the first place. 10: Silence. Actually I and other Nokians would get a lot more work done if we wouldn't be active here so often. :) Let me add one point, since this is about companies nurturing communities: 11: Fail in your core business Then no matter how good you are in 1-10 your community project will fail. -- Quim Gil open source advocate Maemo Devices @ Nokia ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
I think you see maemo.org as being integral part of the Nokia set of websites. It is actually not. maemo.org is, , gifted by Nokia to the community around Maemo. We control it and they are kind enough to pay for everything, but just don't expect it to be nokia.com... In fact there is maemo.nokia.com and that's a different story and totally out of our reach. As for Jaaksi, he's a manager, what'd you expect? To come and answer to all bloggers questions? Moreover that's his personal blog, I think he's free to write/respond to whoever he decides to, isn't him? Anyway.. I think you simply have a wrong expectation on what maemo.org should be and behave. The whole Maemo eco-system is something quite new, and may be hard to grasp at first (and yes, two months do count as at first even if it looks like a lot of hours). So please, first try to really get the idea behind Maemo and maemo.org, then complain with a solid foundation for your arguments (and you'll ever find people willing to discuss more). Aniello ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
ext Jeff Moe wrote: Haha! And he even occassionally responds to comments there too! (More than Maemo's leader.) Like I said, *ideal* Linus Torvalds is chief architect and coordinator of a free software project, hired by a non-profit foundation. Ari Jaaksi is vice-president of a corporation and head of a team developing devices with free and commercial software. If you want to compare both at the same level, that is your choice. On the other hand you could reckon that is not frequent to find business managers at his level blogging and commenting with his casual and quite straightforward approach. -- Quim Gil open source advocate Maemo Devices @ Nokia ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Dnia wtorek, 19 stycznia 2010 o 11:13:30 Jeremiah Foster napisał(a): 8) Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything; You'll have to point to some evidence for this to apply to maemo. The only license changes I have noted are those that go from closed to open, stuff from TI for example. (Thanks again keepsie!) There were components which got closed in Diablo but were open before. Can not tell names now but I remember such event happened. Regards, -- JID: h...@jabber.org Website: http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Am Dienstag, den 19.01.2010, 15:37 +0200 schrieb Quim Gil: I believe we have to solve other problems before this one e.g. increasing the code contributions in the first place. With regard to attaching patches in Bugzilla, it's currently probably quite non-attractive because: * It's not clear where which code repositories are located and if the code is free, and if so how up-to-date it is. Carsten Munk is working on providing an overview for this (9.11-04). Of course tarballs are available, but that means hacking ancient code. * Code reviews by maintainers often take way too long. Nokia should put a high priority on any community-provided patches, otherwise contributors get impatient and lose motivation. In the long run looking forward to seeing co-maintainership of projects. Wondering if anybody has tried yet in the Maemosphere... andre -- Andre Klapper (maemo.org bugmaster) ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
ext Dave Neary dne...@maemo.org writes: You could accomplish a lot more by rattling fewer cages. You've known this community for 50 days. It is important to listen to newcomers. They can provide much needed reality checks and maybe keep you from staring at your own naval too much. While it is certainly nice to get these reality checks delivered in nice ways, we should listen to what is being said even if we don't like the tone. ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
ext Andre Klapper wrote: Am Dienstag, den 19.01.2010, 15:37 +0200 schrieb Quim Gil: I believe we have to solve other problems before this one e.g. increasing the code contributions in the first place. With regard to attaching patches in Bugzilla, it's currently probably quite non-attractive because: * It's not clear where which code repositories are located and if the code is free, and if so how up-to-date it is. Carsten Munk is working on providing an overview for this (9.11-04). Of course tarballs are available, but that means hacking ancient code. * Code reviews by maintainers often take way too long. Nokia should put a high priority on any community-provided patches, otherwise contributors get impatient and lose motivation. Sure, I was thinking about http://maemo.gitorious.org/ In the long run looking forward to seeing co-maintainership of projects. Wondering if anybody has tried yet in the Maemosphere... andre -- Quim Gil open source advocate Maemo Devices @ Nokia ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
Re: How to destroy your community
Hi, It is important to listen to newcomers. They can provide much needed reality checks and maybe keep you from staring at your own naval too much. I'm another such newcomer. As Quim said, one weak point right now is documentation (maybe more about finding what you need than about not having enough). While documentation is spread out between forum.nokia.com and maemo.org, it seems to me that the maemo.org wiki will be the principal hub for Maemo documentation. Am I correct? Now, let's look at Maemo. It's a new phone operating system in a highly competitive area. iPhone OS and Android seem to be far ahead, and the #2 handset manufacturer just unveiled their own OS, Bada. So what is needed for Maemo? Developers, developers, developers. And while there are many applications already available for Maemo (as long-time community members are quick to point out), we are in dire need of slick, useful, finger-friendly applications. The kind of stuff that gets downloaded in the millions in the Apple Store. The stuff users are willing to pay for. These developers work for companies. They are paid to develop these apps and probably aready have experience developing iPhone and/or Android apps. Now imagine their manager coming to them, asking about the progress they are making and those developers replying sorry, I couldn't make any progress this afternoon, wiki.maemo.org was down. Now I know Nokia just sponsors maemo.org, but maybe that's not enough. This is not a experience we want newcomers to have. Because it might be our only chance to get them as developers. As Jeff said running a website is not rocket science. I'm a sysadmin myself. I know it hurts when your baby is down, you don't need other people pointing that out, but fact is the situation was unacceptable and it dragged out for far too long. Server migration is not rocket science either. So far we have a weekend of downtime plus data loss (!) because of a server move. In a business environment, that would seriously threaten the jobs of the people responsible for it. If maemo.org is the go-to place for all things Maemo, then Nokia cannot afford to run it like a hobbyist website. While it is certainly nice to get these reality checks delivered in nice ways, we should listen to what is being said even if we don't like the tone. I too am of the opinion that people need to be woken up. I think the you need to be around for X years to be taken seriously replies are a dangerous thing for Maemo. First of all, this is not just a specialized tablet operating system anymore. We are competing against Smartphones now. The landscape has changed, the competition just got a lot tougher. People like Jeff (and me) come from this background. Frankly, I don't care how things were during OS2007 days. I care how things are compared to Android. And I don't need to be here for several years to witness the server problems. Having problems accessing developer.android.com? No, right? You couldn't take that site down even if you tried. That's the benchmark. Sorry, had to be said. Just remember that all I'm trying to do is wake up people before it's too late. I love programming with Qt and I think the N900 is a very promising device. But in my opinion we need a critical mass of commercial developers for the users to come. Cheers anyway, Stephan ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
RE: How to destroy your community
As maemo transitions to a much larger server farm, there have been hiccups. The site has been slow, but has recently gotten significantly faster, in certain parts. Tero is right though, you just haven't been here long enough to have a reliable sample of uptime vs. downtime with regards to maemo.org. I would disagree; a major hiccup is a hour of down time, a hiccup is the service being restarted.A disaster is this ongoing weekend, and still having several primary services broken and/or totally non-functional. You just don't run a ISP service where you can't fix things in a timely fashion. I have been here for quite a while; and servers just have not been really reliable for the most part (growth can do that -- but I think the warning signs about this ISP should have occurred when it took until late Dec/early Jan to provision the equipment when I believe it was on the Sprint task in Oct); I've also had to ping several people to get things kicked to make them start working again. Nokia/Maemo != Reliability I understand Tero and others have been working hard; but this move is still is a complete fail in how to move properly. My guess is the initial planning wasn't done properly or due diligence with the new isp wasn't done -- I can't think of a good excuse for this weekend with any decent isp host. I could have easily provisioned several servers and got them all setup, communicating and running with either of my own personal projects or my companies fairly complex sites and had them fully functional in under an hour. I just don't understand; Autobuilder, Repositories, Mailing Lists all still being broken several days after the move. 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. Here is what I would like to know, since this has been a fiasco: 1. What servers do we have? Type, what do they each do? (i.e. 1 - HP 3080 2Ghz 8GB, 100GBHD, - handles Autobuilder, Community Mailling Lists) 2. What is the approx cost that Nokia is funding for this. 3. Who has access to them. This info would be great to drop in a wiki page. I might be a small fry, but I personally deal with two distinct webfarms for a couple high availability web sites. I'm sure their our others who have even more experience than I do; together we might be able to help make sure the infrastructure is sound. You do get many things done, but your communication style isn't polite. I do understand that controversy can bring about change, but it can also polarize situations. Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-) (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ -- More non-silence.) Actually I don't consider jaaksi a place of contact or even someone reliably involved community wise with Maemo. His blog posts are for the most part marketing and imho pointless. You want contact with Nokia, Quim is the person to chat with, he is imho the man for any real contact with Nokia. And he does get things done reliably to the best of his ability! He is our critical link/lifeline to Nokia. There are a couple other Nokians, that you can chat with on the mailing lists and TMO for certain specific issues, but for most issues Quim can get you pointed in the right direction. (btw, Thanks Quim!) There is plenty of room for criticism, just try to be polite so that the tenor and tone remain positive enough for people to get work done and not get distracted by pejorative attacks. I would agree be polite! Also don't dismiss the newer members (Not directed at you Jeremiah). Not only do they have fresh perspective; They see the site for how it is now which is what all the other new users of the n900 will see the site. They don't care about how it was during the Nokia 770 days. They care about how it is now! (I also care about now, I don't really care that you had to walk up hill both ways when the Nokia 770 was released G) For the end users they have seen: 1. Unreliable access to software 2. OVI store coming soon for months 3. The entire repositories down this weekend. 4. TMO unreliability For developers add: 1. Lots of Autobuilder issues 2. Garage Issues 3. Mailing list issues (Both Garage and these) 4. zip/gz issues 5. bugzilla lost data 6. SDK rootstraps replacement 7. Wiki Issues 8. DNS issues. These all are reflections not only on the community but on Nokia. The end user isn't going to know that Maemo is not Nokia. And in some cases these services are provided by Nokia. But for the purposes of perspective, it all just looks like Nokia hasn't a clue on how to run things. And if Nokia hasn't a clue, then why would I recommend the n900 to my friends. I think Jeff Moe has a very valid point, we need to take a hard look at what we can do to improve the situation now and in the future. We also probably need to figure out what we did wrong (
Re: How to destroy your community
2010/1/19 Nathan Anderson nat...@andersonsplace.net I would agree be polite! Also don't dismiss the newer members (Not directed at you Jeremiah). IMO the new members should have some common sense about what they write. It is the tone that is the poison, not the point. First there was hell lot of bad tone at tmo, and now I hope this was the first and the last one to mailing lists. If you want to suggest somebody to change something, do you start with Yo, fucker! you are a piece of shit! I think you lack . and you should ?(example aggravated) Why did the conversation opener only picked the gems, aka things that apply to maemo community? Why not picking couple points that doesn't apply at all with those? All negative is a good way to mess things up and make the repicient to ignore the point and everything else. It is basic psychology and regognised by foremen at least in places I've worked. Ossipena / Timo ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
LCA: How to destroy your community
Here is a good article in LWN about a presentation by Josh Berkus. How many of these points apply to Nokia? I'm afraid way too many. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/370157/2a06baf10df8e58a/ Some gems: 1) It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find. 3) There should be no useful information about the code, build methods, the patch submission process, the release process, or anything else. Then, when people ask for help, tell them to RTFM. 4) Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. 5) Employ large amounts of legalese. 7) Keep the decision-making powers unclear 8) Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything; 10) Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all. -Jeff ___ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
