Hi Henne, > Everyone please make sure you add topics you want to be discussed to the > agenda. > > Topics so far: [..] > 3. forum discussion results
Linked on your page, I found http://www.opensuse.org/Forum-discussion-results As I'm not sure, if you wanted this page to be edited by members of the discussion, I first post my comments here. I have three main points: - freedom of speech, i.e. ask the legal staff at Novell how you can give hints to MP3 and DVD playback (#1 FAQ) without getting Novell in trouble. Is there a legal difference between a wiki and mailing list/forum archives? Must these archives and the wiki be located outside the USA and Germany (e.g. in Norway), to be legal? If they are outside, is it legal to say on the wiki "for more information have a look at forum.no"? Is Novell in trademark trouble if the forum is called *suse*.no or *opensuse*.no? Just tell your lawyers, that they are paid to give a solution for our need to answer questions; maybe therefore they should go the supreme court and make the amendments of the constitution valid again. ;-) If they don't find a solution, an official forum will be a sure failure, if every third answer will be "it is not allowed to discuss this here". - maximum sustainability, i.e. a constant flow of information from both mailing lists and forums (usenet is not part of our discussion here) to the wiki pages on opensuse.org. This will reduce answers in the style of "search the archives" and instead allow for a much more precise "look at opensuse.org/xxx". This will reduce the time to find good answers significantly and therefore increase the reputation of the whole openSUSE project. So we should train the moderators to make people publish results in the wiki. Also on the mailing lists it should just become part of netiquette to finish a thread with "please, document your solution on the wiki". - neither scare the beginners nor the experts, i.e. point beginners to the wiki to first read the articles and FAQs there, if they don't find an answer they should go to the forum. Only experienced and expert users should go directly to mailinglists, as the amount of mails must remain consumable for the experts lurking there. The better we manage to reduce the mailing list traffic the higher the chances the Novell employees read those by themselves. The latter two points lead to my small comment for "unless such a forum is bi-directionally gated to e.g. this mailing-list, it will only cause a split in the community". No this should not be _automatically_ "bi-directionally gated", but this should be done by volunteers on the mailing lists, who just ignore "beer discussions" and copy only threads to the forum, which didn't end in a wiki article (just for the sake of the forum archives). If we manage to develop a good search engine with a single request for wiki, forum and mailing list, this direction of information flow is not necessary at all. In the other direction the forum moderators should just push the questions to the mailing lists, which have found no answer within the forum. Like this, the mailing list can stay the place for the experts, who will not be put off by the sheer amount of questions and beginners nevertheless find even difficult questions answered. In this model, the backbone of the community, glueing all members together, are the moderators and volunteers regulating the flow of information and instructing people to care for sustainability by writing bugreports and wiki articles. Ciao Siegbert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
