On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 12:34:31PM -0500, Joseph M. Gaffney wrote: > > It's not that it is angering. It is the way this is going about. It is > > asking for the opinions of the maintainers but no one "in charge" going to > > ask. It is asking Viras to start a discussion on suselinuxsupport.de but > > before he gets the chance, announce there will be a "technical" forum. It > > is everyone saying it will help unify the community and not trying to unfiy > > what we have already. > > Except thats not what happened, and not what was said here on the list. > Again, I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong), but the decision was > regarding technical *capability*, not a "technical forum".
Paraphrased and from memory, what I said in my FOSDEM talk was: - we are working on the technical part of a forum now, because experience from the wiki shows that setting up a new website feature for openSUSE.org needs time, and because there's some custom development involved (using the same login mechanism as bugzilla and the wiki). We are starting to work on this even if the discussion is still ongoing. - It is difficult to decide something on a mailing list, especially a topic controversial enough to sustain a discussion for several weeks with the same points made over and over again. From my point of view, it's a draw, there are as many reasons for a forum as against. - While initially against the forums, I have heard very good reasons for creating them which changed my mind. The most important one for me: Right now opensuse.org is turning users away, to the existing community forums, to the lists at lists.suse.com, to the #suse channel. This sends the message that opensuse.org is just for developers, which is, in my opinion, plain wrong. I would like to see both users and developers on opensuse.org, and if for users we need a webforum, so be it. - If a new reason appears why forums run on opensuse.org are a really bad idea, we stop working on the technical part and will have some amount of person days and recources "wasted". So what. Apart from that, a few thoughts: - yes, bootstrapping a working forum community is a major piece of work. I am aware of that, but I think it can be done. - I would like to find a way to work together and/or peacefully coexist with the existing forums, and I'm very happy to see staff from these on this list. - I assume that with openSUSE the potential audience for web forums grows sufficiently that we don't have to compete for users. I don't want to see the opensuse.org forums, should they be created, as a replacement for existing forums. I also don't think that there's any way, or any need, to "unify" the existing forum communities. The opensuse.org forums will be just another offering to users. - Finally, it is true that I haven't shown up in the closed forum discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] mentioned. It got lost during FOSDEM preparations. Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Research & Development SUSE Linux Products GmbH --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
