I joined the OpenSUSE mailing list after suseforums staff made me aware of the dialog regarding official forums. I believe I've read every comment on the issue via the archives and live list. I've been silent so far, aside from some limited public dialog on suseforums.net and private dialog with suseforums.net staff. From some comments from key contributors to the mailing list, it appears the decision has already been made and the mailing list is simply looking to validate the decision they've already made by getting comments from the major players impacted. I won't attempt to access the state of decision, other than to comment that it was communicated to me that my input would be appreciated.
1) community An official sponsored forum probably won't do much for a sense of community, unless one defines a community as having some corporate sanction. Most folks don't think the existing Novell forums do much for the community, and they're officially sponsored. Community is more than Linux...in fact, IMO community doesn't really start until you've stepped outside Linux, and began to explore each other in ways that don't depend on technical subject matter. It's a dialog about music, movies, books, philosophy, or politics that begins to truly define us, not what distro we use and how much we know about it. No corporate sponsored official community I've seen can bring that diversity to a forum, although one might bend things a bit and say the Ubuntu or Gentoo forums do. They aren't "corporate" in the traditional sense though, so this would be an important question to get answered: "How much control/influence would Novell/SUSE exercise over format/content in exchange for 'official' sponsorship?" 2) competition between boards Is an official community supposed to eliminate or replace the existing forums? If so, the existing official Novell forums haven't. If the issue is multiple discussion boards, it's far more likely that opening a second official forum will simply add one to the mix, not provide the consolidation intended. 3) investment of those boards already running Those existing forums have made a significant financial investment in the SUSE community. I don't imagine there is financial compensation in the mix for hosting contracts or hardware investments to which those individuals might be contractually bound. They'll be expected to eat any commitment they've already made. Given that, wouldn't you expect them to simply continue to run the boards? If they're paying anyway, they might as well be running a board. This could preclude them from joining the new official discussion board and bringing their expertise there. It also runs the risk of diluting the pool of those commited individuals who moderate those forums, resulting in less quality, not more. Running a discussion board is a skill too, just like teaching, or coding. Time goes on, things change. The time invested in the existing forums is significant as well, and has provided a positive community atmosphere for SUSE to date. If one is thinking of replacing them, or providing them competition, wouldn't it be nice to have better reasons than "we need a single place to go" or "it will build the community"? Who can justify these reasons with any substantiative data? 4) what problem would "official" forums be designed to fix? Building something new typically means better. What would the new official forums be designed to fix? How would they fix it? Without clear definition of these answers, it's quite likely any expected benefits would not materialize. I hear people say "having an official forums would be good", but they're not specific about what problems exist that "official" forums will solve. Assume the official forums are up. What will make them better than the official forums we have today? The Novell forums aren't popular, and don't provide the answers to the very few real reasons I've heard for having new official forums. What will make the new forums unique enough to help? Or would there just be another official board diluting the community? 5) is a one size fits all solution what people want? (the size of linuxquestions) I know for myself, the larger the board, the less comfortable I feel. I don't want it too small, but a place like linuxquestions.org is just too big for me. I'm looking for more intimacy, and I like to get to know folks. The Ubuntu forums and Gentoo forums are of the size now that one must spend hours a day if one wants to just browse new posts, looking for items of interest. It wouldn't bother everyone...but it's something to consider. 6) what's changed to make this an issue now? Given SUSE's been around for some time, and the community seems to be quite alive and well, what's different now that makes this issue important? If not having an Ubuntu-like discussion board was the kiss of death for a distro, we'd have a lot of casualties...such as Fedora Core and Mandriva. 7) is it a decision that can't be postponed without penalty? If this is not time critical, can the decision simply be postponed until the justification is more clear than "we don't have one, so we should"? 8) choice Hasn't the Linux community always demonstrated a definite preference for choice? Given that, new official forums would provide another choice, but is another choice similar to what we have already but with a logo gonna really provide value? I tend to believe having 100 Linux distros goes beyond choice, and simply dilutes a precious resource pool. Would we be traveling the same path...choice without diversity? 9) opportunity and timing Up until Novell purchased SUSE, SUSE did not have official forums, so some dedicated SUSE lovers filled the need. Novell tried with official forums after the purchase, but it never took off. Is it possible the time for making that happen without fragmenting the community has simply passed? Could the Ubuntu forums or Gentoo forums as we know them have been created long after smaller, less "official" forums had been filling the need? Sometimes, the moment for certain decisions has simply passed, and the opportunity is gone. 10) quality of support Some people with whom I've dialogued concerning the idea of new "official" forums have implied (or directly assumed) that official forums would provide a higher quality of support than what we have today. The assumption of better support or access to more advanced expertise can only be fulfilled if something is radically different about the proposed new "official" forums. Are there going to be Linux developers monitoring the forums and participating in problem resolution? Are the members of the new forums going to be immune to the time/effort issues associated with answering tough questions and be immune to burnout? In other words, unless there are some clear differentiating factors with the proposed new "official" forums, I think it unlikely we would see any quality of support improvement over existing forums. 11) weighing the "user" vote I'd suppose any poll or user vote would favor "official" forums. Why not? If I had no experience from the inside of running a discussion board and trying to build an online community, I'd simply vote yes without thinking. I never wanted to run a discussion board...sort of backed into it, and a tough situation with a lot of misunderstanding led to my current role. I participated in the birth of suseforums.net out of a real love for the community, and I hope my viewpoint today reflects that love of community more than ever. It, on the one hand, pushes me to favor a single place to go...as I spend a lot of time in the Gentoo forums personally. I doubt anyone can see the Ubuntu or Gentoo discussion boards and not be impressed by their communities. On the other hand, my prior experience with suselinuxsupport.de, and with suseforums.net lately has led me to believe that the SUSE community is no less served by the existing situation than Ubuntu or Gentoo. Culture is subtle thing, and a discussion board's culture is a huge part of it's appeal, or lack of it. The existing SUSE discussion boards differ in culture (both private and public), and that provides an advantage for SUSE that Gentoo or Ubuntu can't offer. Choice works given the current number of options; more choices, or less choices might not. 12) body of knowledge, embrace and extend? Ideally, the "encyclopedia" of knowledge would be searchable and indexed. It's possible the current situation with Web-based SUSE user communities might be worsened, and not bettered by the pursuit of a "official" forum. Given the questions and answers already posted to existing forums, mailing lists, and USENET will never be consolidated into one place, could the concept of a single web presence to go for SUSE support, information, and answers be better served by an extension of the Wiki? Perhaps a search function could be coded and built for the Wiki that searches the current (and future) known repositories of SUSE knowledge (mailing lists, forums, USENET, etc.) and returns the results through the Wiki interface as clickable links? By limiting the search to known repositories, we could create a faster, more focused search than is currently attainable by global search engines like Google. A user could be directed to the Community page of the Wiki in the event his/her search is unproductive to engage those communities directly. This particular idea of course, might only be the beginning of a better idea that presents itself in dialog. We preserve the choice the Open Source community has come to expect, but virtualize the interface? I would suspect this comes closer to a solution that all of us (especially the existing web forums) can get behind and fully commit to. Is it possible, or probable, that the _best_ solution is to build on what we have, and not compete with or replace what exists, but embrace and extend the SUSE community? Backwards compatibility? (LOL) Keith -- Keith Kastorff [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
