Eric,
A quick overall response. You have accounts on the EN and FR forums.
Why not raise this as a general issue on the EN forums? I am sure that
the guys/gals would be willing to support this broadening if it's clear
that we can find volunteers who have the knowledge and are willing put
the time in to answer Qs on these forks.
However, you are also raising a wider point that if the move to Apache
is going to reflect a policy change reaching out rather than distancing
from the wider OOo family and forks, then that is a whole topic in its
own right and far wider than just forum support.
In fact as a general asset, our (OOo Forums) community probably brings a
lot of pragmatic knowledge on how to set up and to run community
forums. We should be willing to share that knowledge.
On the admin side, we've set up 9 forums in a very scalable way and done
a lot to make them zero admin. Adding another for another Apache
project if wanted is pretty trivial. There are also probably a dozen
people with in-depth moderation experience who might be willing to
provide consultancy here.
Regards Terry
Hi Terry,
Le 5 août 11 à 12:08, Terry Ellison a écrit :
On 05/08/11 08:10, eric b wrote:
Le 5 août 11 à 03:12, Pedro Giffuni a écrit :
Yes, it will continue to be inclusive for all OpenOffice derivatives.
So I'm still wondering why OOo4Kids and OOoLight are yet not listed ...
Eric,
The short answer is no once has asked or the demand isn't there --
yet. The long answer is slightly more complex:
I tend to disagree with your short answer.
Historically and (possibly with some tweaks) going forward, the
people who make the policy decision on the forums are the people who
contribute to them. In a 100% community run effort, IFAIK, this is
the only formula that will work.
[...cut...]
On the EN forum we run two closed sub-forums: one "EN - Forum Issues
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewforum.php?f=69&sid=da1779e4dd6562bf9cbbc0efd49c1292>"
for discussing policy issues, and one "Site - Forum Administration
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewforum.php?f=84&sid=da1779e4dd6562bf9cbbc0efd49c1292>"
for wider admin issues. We do this in English, but members opinions
are weighted if they are representing an NL consensus (e.g. our
committers Zoltán Reizinger and Kazunari Hirano represent the HU and
JA communities).
Reading what you wrote, I now understand better why OOo4Kids and
OOoLight have no visibility in some countries.
Sorry BTW if you try to access these, but they are closed so that we
can be more frank amongst ourselves in discussion. Each other NL
forum has a closed Forum Issues forum to manage its business.
Policy issues are discussed here and it is the consensus here that
sets policy. So for example we had a long debate on whether to
support LibreOffice when the Oracle view seemed to us to be hostile
to this. Our strong consensus was that in reality there is one OOo
community, and so it made sense to do so.
When I see OOo Community, I really do not understand the selection
EducOOo, has historicaly been created because of some people blocking
any initiative coming from the Education Project (the same people
migrated to TDF since). EducOOo tries to act as an OpenOffice.org lab
and provided several improvements, who have been reversed/integrated
into OpenOffice.org (like Impress annotation mode, Equation editor
improvement and some other like some Linux ARM optimization).
Our main goal is to contribute back to OpenOffice.org. As example,
since several years, we trained a lot of students around
OpenOffice.org code, and our actions helped to make OpenOffice.org
enter in schools in France.
And if you want to compare with other forks, there is (to my
knowledge) no code reversed by LibreOffice and NeoOffice to
OpenOffice.org. But that's apparently no problem : they appear in your
forums.
So, there is something hurting me : OpenOffice.org forks who do not
reverse any code to OpenOffice.org ARE visible, and OOo4Kids and
OOoLight, aimed to reverse contributions are not ?
I hope you understand better my point of view now ...
The issue about supporting any specific product, however, is that you
need enough active volunteers with knowledge of the specific flavour
to credibly offer support.
Let's try a different approach: if the item exists on the forums,
there will be _de_facto_ a support ? (yet the chicken egg issue .. ).
OOo4Kids (and OOoLight) behavior is(are) very close to OpenOffice.org,
and we mostly hide things (what does not avoid us to invent new
features). To avoid being a concurrent to OpenOffice.org, we removed
Basic, and Java.
and there is no problem to maintain and answer questions. More: every
added feature was the result of an user-designer-developer
interaction, and the logical of the processus is easy to retrieve. See
our wiki (http://wiki.ooo4kids.org) , and look at the number of times
the pages have been acceeed if you prefer.
+ you could as well look at the code documentation : some pages have
been read more than 28, 000 times (without any thank you, though :-/
) and translated in several locales.
Some random examples :
French, but extremely informative :
http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/IdeasAndSuggestions/fr
Toolbars and user level :
http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/ToolbarsAndUserLevel
Password protected preferences :
http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/PasswordProtectedPreferences
Impress new cursors : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/AddNewCursors
As you can see, our role is far over the simple fork idea, and we can
explain a lot.
I don't think we've reached that threshold for OOo4Kids and OOoLight
yet.
Again, this is the typical chicken-egg issue : we are in the situation
where some people decide to hide our existence, and claim nobody knows
us afterwards. What I do not accept.
Back to the topic, OOo4Kids is provided for MS Windows, Mac OS and
Linux, in 17 locales. There is even an OpenBSD port (working well)
and OOo4Kids alone is close to 1 million of downloads (94% use
windows, and 45% download the en-US version) !! To be honest, these
figures are pessimistic, and the number of downloads is a lot more in
fact, but we limited them to be sure of what we say.
We even provide a (non official) Debian repository, for both OOoLight
and OOo4Kids
Please verify by yourself : http://download.ooo4kids.org and
http://download.ooolight.org
Following this success, we decided to create educoo.be, educoo.it,
educoo.es, educoo.no and some other (I don't have all in mind, sorry)
Note: we are searching some volunteers to manage educoo.us and
educoo.de (looks cyber squatted).
Regards,
Eric Bachard
