[...]
> Some questions for consideration:
>
> * Are we happy with the current size and growth rate
> of the community?
More is better...except there's the assimilation issue. Some of us
remember when Usenet went to heck, first with immigration lawyers
spamming everything, and then with clueless newbies that didn't bother
to learn the netiquette or RTFM or even read the FAQs first.
The entry page does very prominently feature a list of steps people
can take to start to familiarize themselves with what it's all about.
This is good. If various documentation were gathered together, that
would be better. If there were multiple listings, one of which might
might be how much prior knowledge each document assumed (introductory,
intermediate, advanced, guru, ...), or grouped by how it fit into the
steps listed on the front page perhaps, then the documentation collection
(mostly stuff not in docs.sun.com I suppose, although pointers to there
where particularly helpful and applicable might not be unreasonable) could
serve to better support not only growth in quantity but growth in depth
of involvement.
> * Are we measuring this growth accurately?
What are the metrics? Accounts on opensolaris.org? Accounts used in
the last x days? Number of posts? Number of RFEs or bug reports?
Number of contributions? I'm going to guess that most of the early
interest, people long familiar with Solaris and not frightened at the
idea of at least looking at code to understand something, have already
shown up (if not, then your publicity has been a flop, IMO!).
Given some set of metrics reflecting depth of participation, it might
be interesting to group timelines of increasing depth of participation
of a given account (not listing the accounts in the reports, of course,
but showing how many went from new account to looking to posting
to something more substantive (even filing a bug report or RFE) in
about what timespan, and how many just stopped at what point.
The points before which the most either stop or loiter particularly
long might need to be made more inviting, or more information
provided (or at least organized) to support further participation, or both.
> * How much could we potentially grow? And in what
> areas?
How many people can set their digital watch without reading the
instructions first? Of those, how many will then go and read the
instructions anyway to be sure they understand all the features?
Those who can do both those things without discomfort, and will
take that much initiative, have Internet access, and are less than
totally satisfied with whatever other OS they're using, are at least
remote possibilities.
Even those who are not digitally all that savvy, but can read,
comprehend, and translate messages, documentation, etc, also
have something they could be involved in. (I have to make a
special effort to remember that liberal-arts types are people too.)
Heck, I suppose those with just a user-level of familiarity, but
contagious enthusiasm (along with some sense of how to avoid
adulterating a message, not going off on their own rants, etc),
could have a place. (I don't really have to remember that the
Madison Avenue types are people too, do I? Yuck.)
Those are basic categories, IMO. There may be more, but they're
not obvious to me.
Then there are mechanisms; website, user groups, conferences,
other publicity, ...
I wonder what could be done to win over more of the Linux crowd
without the insulting implication "you've tried the toy, now try the
real thing"? They've certainly got the enthusiasm down solid, even
if I might not agree with their engineering practices. Too bad Linus
seems to hate the proposed GPLv3 (which some seem to think might
otherwise strike a broader compromise than the rather ideological
GPLv2).
> * If we wanted to grow in size significantly, how
> would we do it?
Uh, substance and publicity, coupled. Every time there's
a putback of something both cool and substantial, have a
press release, not just a post to opensolaris-announce
(or maybe hold those until there's isos available, for those
who just want to burn and load for starters)
> * Now that the community is more diversified, how do
> we view Sun's role?
Direction (but not too coercive, although it has to be
understood that Sun needs to stay in business to keep
the goodies coming) and expertise, foremost.
> * What are we not doing as a community that we could
> or should be doing?
Well, I tend to view community as some sort of socialist
conspiracy myself (it takes individuals before you can have
a village). But...for something that's clearly too big for
any one person...asking questions like you're doing, and
inviting others to do so, isn't a bad step. It all boils
down to encouraging participation. Heck, ask folks that
hit one of the metrics of participation to describe their
experience with it, and make a representative sample of
the reasonably well written ones available (with permission);
that way those who aren't sure what they're getting themselves
into will have a greater comfort factor. (just don't ask me...
suggesting something isn't _always_ the same as volunteering...)
> * What should Sun do to help grow the community, and
> what should we as a
> community do for ourselves?
I'm not sure, but
s/should/can/
and then prioritize and deconflict.
> *What's possible?
> * What am I missing ...
Some bugfixes for the forums, I think; for one, it mangled
the "Quote Original". Seriously, the website has to be
both well designed (to draw one in and to do useful things)
and reliable, but without undue flash (and no Flash, please,
at least until there's a _reliable_ and _compatible_ plugin
for Solaris, and preferably as little as possible even after).
It's pretty good, and getting better, but has a ways to go
on both organization and bug-killing. The look as such is
IMO pretty good; reminiscent of Google's nice clean,
fast-loading entry page (although they do have a good
idea with the occasionally used special occasion logos).
Allowing personalized views of the forum list (with notification
of new forums and an opportunity to re-edit the list of shown
forums) might be nice if possible; something like subscribing
to newsgroups for us oldies. For instance, someone into
translations might want to see the internationalization forums
corresponding to whatever they speak, but us monolingual
(on a good day) types might just want to see the general
i18n forum; or people might want to limit the user groups
shown to the one(s) they're likeliest to have something to do
with. Those are the two areas that are most obvious, but
I'm sure there are other examples of cases where people
might want to scroll through less while trying to stay current.
Another thing - if someone has a {blog, wiki, website} that
has a reasonable degree of relevancy (I don't, but hey), where
does it say what to do to get it (possibly) added somewhere?
I suppose that info is available somewhere, but if I don't
remember where, I wonder if it's obvious enough.
Those are just a couple of examples of ways in which the website
could be made more useful. The latter question (how easy is
it to find X) should probably be asked about almost any piece of
persistent information when thinking about how the overall
organization should be laid out; while the former notion
also generalizes (allowing the user to customize what they see
of volatile information).
I'm sure there's about a million other possibilities; maybe I've hit
a handful there, and probably not the best ones, either. But
I've rambled enough; someone else, please run with the ball for
awhile.
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