Hi, Personally, I prefer mailing lists (which is why it galls me to be top posting on this stupid BlackBerry), however the Internet's moved past 1996 and fora, despite all their comparitive flaws, are the masses' preferred means of group communication.
However, trying to enforce a split between the ML for "official" stuff and the fora for "end-user" stuff is bound to fail. I know, we've been living with the consequences of a similar decision on maemo.org for about 3 years. There are two fundamental flaws. 1) Political. We'll get vocal end users trolling (or, if you prefer, validly expressing their discontent) that they "weren't informed" about something or other. Now, we'll always get these types who want to be spoonfed every piece of information. Even if you provide such a mechanism, they will complain they couldn't find out how to subscribe to meego-spoonfeed. 2) Future community. The term "end-user" is, frankly, wrong. No end-user will ever visit meego.com, only enthusiasts, developers and commercial entities (for various reasons). How many IPhone, or even Android, users visit some community website on a regular basis? I'd wager a very small percentage. But this segregation prevents someone moving up from "enthusiast" to "app developer" to "platform developer"; or from "enthusiast" to "community representative" (or both ;-)). Communities are organic, saying "OK, so you want to be a community organiser, come here" doesn't really work - they won't feel part of *that* community. Let's pick one place and make it work. From the sounds of it, it exists and it's called Deja^WGoogle Groups. Cheers, Andrew PS. Fora really don't scale without lots of custom tweaks. We're getting closer with talk.maemo.org, but it's still not great (I want to be able to mute threads so they never show up in my newposts or newsub.php views) On 03/06/2010, Robin Burchell <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Dawn, > > On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Foster, Dawn M <[email protected]> > wrote: >> A while back, we made the discussion to move the community office >> discussions to the forum. After living with that decision for a month or >> so, I'm starting to think that the discussions should be moved back to >> meego-community. The community discussions have just been too disconnected >> from the developers (who love their mailing lists). Right now, the >> developers form the base of the MeeGo community, and the reality is that >> the mailing lists are the best way to keep the developers connected to the >> broader community efforts (MeeGo conference, etc.) > > From my perspective at least, I totally must have missed the memo > about this announcement. I only figured it out when I realised that > -community had been really quiet and went to have another look at the > forums. For one reason or another I haven't gotten totally attached to > them yet (though I still hope this will happen), and as a result, I > haven't been participating in discussions there much. > > But I'm also atypical in that I don't absolutely hate forums. I know a > number of developer types who do dislike them because they mostly > don't scale in terms of trying to keep track of multiple topics across > multiple projects. > >> What I don't want to have is official community office discussions >> happening in both places, so I would like to pick one place for the >> community discussions. I propose moving those discussions back to >> meego-community. > > Definitely a sensible move. One or the other. And this time I'd > suggest that if it *is* the forums, close the -community ML. Vice > versa, if it *is* a mailing list, close the community forums. > >> The forums have been a great way for end users to get engaged with the >> project and ask questions, and I think that we should keep the end user >> discussions in the forum. This would give us a more clean split: >> * Mailing lists: MeeGo project discussions, developer discussions, >> community office, etc. >> * Forums: End user questions, installation / troubleshooting, using MeeGo, >> etc. > > I'm OK either way for the most part. I really hold no strong opinions. > Provided there are some people at the end of the day that cross into > both mediums and are able to represent the concerns of the wider > community (which will not be a problem with such a strong group of > people as we have), then it will work at the end of the day, I think. > >> >> Thoughts, issues, questions, flame wars? >> >> Dawn > > > Robin Burchell > mob: +447702671419 > msn: [email protected] > irc: w00t @ irc.freenode.net > twr: http://twitter.com/w00teh > lac: http://identi.ca/w00t > _______________________________________________ > MeeGo-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev > -- Andrew Flegg -- mailto:[email protected] | http://www.bleb.org/ Maemo Community Council chair _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
