Re: [Sugar-devel] Today's Minutes and Next Meeting Time

[Srevin Saju]

On 12/11/20 12:18 AM, Alex Perez wrote:


James Cameron wrote on 12/9/20 9:09 PM:

On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 07:13:49AM +0300, Srevin Saju wrote:

G'day!

I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,

It is about time this came up again.

Pretty much :)


:D


We have been using IRC for many years. Recently, some of our
communication moved to Slack, and some to Jitsi. What is Sugar
Labs's idea of a best, unified communication platform which it
should recommend to new developers.  Right now, all the guides point
directly to IRC,

Yes, even my "How to get started as a Sugar Labs developer" points to
IRC.

Yes, the problem is, we recommend IRC, but we do not use it. There are 
people who follow guides like this, set up everything on IRC with some 
great difficulty, put some message out there in the channel, and receive 
no reply. Yes, we are in different timezones, but perhaps we should 
explicitly tell them to "stay around for 48 hours, we cannot reply 
immediately" or something like that.

most new developers, who are interested to contributing to Sugar
drop a message to an IRC channel, and almost never get a reply. This
is possibly because the communication has diversified, or because of
a community split on the basis of communication medium.

It is easier to explain the lack of reply as being caused by a lack of
contributing members, and a focus by the remaining members on their
specific projects in a way that does not require collaborating in
real-time.  The GitHub commit pattern over time confirms this.

Hmm

Recently, many new developers told us of the difficulties of using
IRC clients, the need for Bouncers, etc.

(a) my preference is not to call them developers until they have
contributed,
I assume they are supposed to be called contributors right? I mean "just 
developers", not "Sugar developers"

Agreed. Until you've contributed something, you're just an interested
party. Simply aspiring to be a developer does not make you one.

(b) these barriers to using IRC do not seem difficult; above all, why
are we doing FreeNode's job for them?

In what way do you feel we're doing FreeNode's job for them? I don't get it.


If you are saying about matrix, just like freenode, they require 
registration. They require registration unlike freenode. Freenode has 
registration optional, but almost all matrix servers require 
registration by an email address. So, all matrix users are registered.


Regarding the bouncer, its just because of the decentralized nature of 
matrix. It is not a bouncer actually, it is just how it works, like 
modern chat clients. The server remains connected to all freenode 
channels in the world (not just #sugar), and we can opt in to join any 
freenode channel we wish to.



We (some of us) suggested them to use a Matrix client to connect to
#sugar, and indeed they are quite satisfied with new mode of
communication.. The Matrix protocol.

Most recent discussion on #sugar was just you talking to cyksager, and
we couldn't see anything from them until they did something to fix it.


Yes, thats when Bernie suggested cyksagar to use matrix instead of 
Sugar. Thats when I wrote to this channel. The matrix channel was not 
very published. Many people did not know about it, but still there are 
many people who have found the matrix channel on their own without us 
telling them to: for example, jamescarter, icarito, _llaske, and 
previously purhan



The Matrix protocol is interesting. Sugar had a matrix channel for
many years. Recently we set up a bridge between the matrix channel
(#sugar:matrix.org) and the IRC irc.freenode.net channel, i.e
(#sugar), which helped a few developers to keep connected to the IRC
channel without a bouncer and also make use of newer clients for
mobile, for example Element Android (available  on F-droid, Google
Play), and Element iOS. Element / Matrix has a intuitive web client
which supports reactions and better formatting as compared to IRC,
and is the best place for a developer to start contributing. The
most interesting and useful feature is the IRC bridge, which helps
to make use of the best of Matrix and maintain the connection
between the IRC channel and the Matrix channel. The bridge is a tool
which helps to convert the IRC protocol to the matrix protocol and
vice versa.

Topic of discussion, we a Sugar Gitter channel, Sugarizer Matrix
channel, etc. Matrix has the support to integrate everything to a
single channel.  What is your opinion?

While it may be a factually accurate statement that "we have had this
channel for years", that doesn't mean it's been trafficked/visited much
at all. For instance, I had no knowledge of its existence before several
months ago, when the IRC bridge was set up. The IRC channel has existed
since the inception of the Sugar Labs project. You may see IRC as an
antiquated protocol, and I have no problem with Sugar Matrix channel,
bridged to the IRC channel. But to show up and suggest that we eliminate
the primary real-time 

Re: [Sugar-devel] Today's Minutes and Next Meeting Time

[James Cameron]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 01:18:28PM -0800, Alex Perez wrote:
> James Cameron wrote on 12/9/20 9:09 PM:
> > On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 07:13:49AM +0300, Srevin Saju wrote:
> >> G'day!
> >>
> >> I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,
> > It is about time this came up again.
> 
> Pretty much :)

Heh.

> > (b) these barriers to using IRC do not seem difficult; above all, why
> > are we doing FreeNode's job for them?
>
> In what way do you feel we're doing FreeNode's job for them? I don't
> get it.

Oh, sorry.  When we explain to potential contributors how to register
to use IRC.  FreeNode has this responsibility.  Were we to assume that
responsibility we would have to track any changes to the instructions.

In similar fashion, 
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Matrix
assumes some responsibility for how to use Matrix.

On the positive side, I love how our potential contributors have
yielded someone like Srevin who doesn't need to be told how to do
things with tools like git, github, IRC, and Matrix.

I welcome potential contributors, but I just don't think we need to
hold their hands and lead them around.  I give them a list of things
to do, and when they don't do them I know what to do next; nothing.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Today's Minutes and Next Meeting Time

[Alex Perez]

James Cameron wrote on 12/9/20 9:09 PM:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 07:13:49AM +0300, Srevin Saju wrote:
>> G'day!
>>
>> I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,
> It is about time this came up again.

Pretty much :)
>
>> We have been using IRC for many years. Recently, some of our
>> communication moved to Slack, and some to Jitsi. What is Sugar
>> Labs's idea of a best, unified communication platform which it
>> should recommend to new developers.  Right now, all the guides point
>> directly to IRC,
> Yes, even my "How to get started as a Sugar Labs developer" points to
> IRC.
>
>> most new developers, who are interested to contributing to Sugar
>> drop a message to an IRC channel, and almost never get a reply. This
>> is possibly because the communication has diversified, or because of
>> a community split on the basis of communication medium.
> It is easier to explain the lack of reply as being caused by a lack of
> contributing members, and a focus by the remaining members on their
> specific projects in a way that does not require collaborating in
> real-time.  The GitHub commit pattern over time confirms this.
>
>> Recently, many new developers told us of the difficulties of using
>> IRC clients, the need for Bouncers, etc.
> (a) my preference is not to call them developers until they have
> contributed,

Agreed. Until you've contributed something, you're just an interested
party. Simply aspiring to be a developer does not make you one.
>
> (b) these barriers to using IRC do not seem difficult; above all, why
> are we doing FreeNode's job for them?
In what way do you feel we're doing FreeNode's job for them? I don't get it.
>
>> We (some of us) suggested them to use a Matrix client to connect to
>> #sugar, and indeed they are quite satisfied with new mode of
>> communication.. The Matrix protocol.
> Most recent discussion on #sugar was just you talking to cyksager, and
> we couldn't see anything from them until they did something to fix it.
>
>> The Matrix protocol is interesting. Sugar had a matrix channel for
>> many years. Recently we set up a bridge between the matrix channel
>> (#sugar:matrix.org) and the IRC irc.freenode.net channel, i.e
>> (#sugar), which helped a few developers to keep connected to the IRC
>> channel without a bouncer and also make use of newer clients for
>> mobile, for example Element Android (available  on F-droid, Google
>> Play), and Element iOS. Element / Matrix has a intuitive web client
>> which supports reactions and better formatting as compared to IRC,
>> and is the best place for a developer to start contributing. The
>> most interesting and useful feature is the IRC bridge, which helps
>> to make use of the best of Matrix and maintain the connection
>> between the IRC channel and the Matrix channel. The bridge is a tool
>> which helps to convert the IRC protocol to the matrix protocol and
>> vice versa.
>>
>> Topic of discussion, we a Sugar Gitter channel, Sugarizer Matrix
>> channel, etc. Matrix has the support to integrate everything to a
>> single channel.  What is your opinion?

While it may be a factually accurate statement that "we have had this
channel for years", that doesn't mean it's been trafficked/visited much
at all. For instance, I had no knowledge of its existence before several
months ago, when the IRC bridge was set up. The IRC channel has existed
since the inception of the Sugar Labs project. You may see IRC as an
antiquated protocol, and I have no problem with Sugar Matrix channel,
bridged to the IRC channel. But to show up and suggest that we eliminate
the primary real-time collaboration tool that the project has used since
its inception shows, frankly, somewhat of a lack of understanding of how
open source projects work. You need to learn to build consensus. If you
show up and, shortly thereafter, say "I don't like the way we
communicate", let's change it completely, you're inevitably going to
experience resistance. To expect anything else is nuts. We have mailing
lists for non-realtime communications. If you're e-mail averse, you will
not last long in any open source community.
> My opinion is that you've got the cart before the horse.  First thing
> that is needed is for potential contributors to become developers, and
> to collaborate on something.
Agreed. And honestly, if you can't follow basic directions on how to use
and connect to an IRC channel, I find it very, very unlikely that
newcomers will have the patience necessary to become meaningful
contributors.
>
> Where you have potential contributors using IRC to ask questions that
> are answered by documentation or source code; that's just a help line
> or chat bot.  It is often a waste of time to invest in that.  Better
> is to fix the problem they are reporting.
Agreed. It's not as though we have paid customer support/engagement
people to do anything with such complaints, anyways.
>
>> Interesting points of discussion and helpful material:
>>
>> * Pull request to add Matrix 

Re: [Sugar-devel] Today's Minutes and Next Meeting Time

[Walter Bender]

We can add this to the agenda for the Dec. 23 meeting.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 11:13 PM Srevin Saju  wrote:
>
> G'day!
>
> I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,
>
> We have been using IRC for many years. Recently, some of our
> communication moved to Slack, and some to Jitsi. What is Sugar Labs's
> idea of a best, unified communication platform which it should recommend
> to new developers. Right now, all the guides point directly to IRC, most
> new developers, who are interested to contributing to Sugar drop a
> message to an IRC channel, and almost never get a reply. This is
> possibly because the communication has diversified, or because of a
> community split on the basis of communication medium.
>
> Recently, many new developers told us of the difficulties of using IRC
> clients, the need for Bouncers, etc. We (some of us) suggested them to
> use a Matrix client to connect to #sugar, and indeed they are quite
> satisfied with new mode of communication.. The Matrix protocol.
>
> The Matrix protocol is interesting. Sugar had a matrix channel for many
> years. Recently we set up a bridge between the matrix channel
> (#sugar:matrix.org) and the IRC irc.freenode.net channel, i.e (#sugar),
> which helped a few developers to keep connected to the IRC channel
> without a bouncer and also make use of newer clients for mobile, for
> example Element Android (available  on F-droid, Google Play), and
> Element iOS. Element / Matrix has a intuitive web client which supports
> reactions and better formatting as compared to IRC, and is the best
> place for a developer to start contributing. The most interesting and
> useful feature is the IRC bridge, which helps to make use of the best of
> Matrix and maintain the connection between the IRC channel and the
> Matrix channel. The bridge is a tool which helps to convert the IRC
> protocol to the matrix protocol and vice versa.
>
> Topic of discussion, we a Sugar Gitter channel, Sugarizer Matrix
> channel, etc. Matrix has the support to integrate everything to a single
> channel. What is your opinion?
>
> Interesting points of discussion and helpful material:
>
> * Pull request to add Matrix as a communication medium
> (https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/pull/203)
> * Matrix Sugar Labs wiki page (https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Matrix)
> * Official matrix-irc guide
> (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Guide:-How-to-use-Matrix-to-participate-in-IRC-rooms)
>
> As of now, many popular open source communities use Matrix as the main
> mode of communication, and all the sister nodes bridged to the matrix
> network
> For example:
>
> * Fedora
> * KDE
> * Mozilla Thunderbird
>
> It would be cool, if we discuss this among a wider range of community,
> putting a lot of people's idea rather than two of us discussion [cited].
> So, I hope this topic, would be a good candidate for the next SLOBS meeting.
>
> Regards
>
> On 12/9/20 11:48 PM, devin@ulibarri.website wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > The date and time of the next SLOBs Meeting
> >  is
> > 12-23-20 at 19:30 UTC.
> >
> > For the next meeting, the agenda is up at
> > https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-23
> > 
> > We will be discussing a possible "Sugar Labs Code-in", so it would be
> > great to have your input.
> > I recommend that, if you are interested in attending the meeting, you:
> > 1. Mark your calendar. I do my best to send reminders, but today my
> > email got trapped in spam and I did not have the time to troubleshoot.
> > 2. Please let us know soon if you plan to attend so that we may send
> > you a link in advance. Please send your request to
> > sl...@lists.sugarlabs.org 
> > As for today's meeting minutes, they are up at:
> >
> > https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Meeting_Minutes-2020-12-09
> > 
> >
> > Best,
> > Devin
> >
> > ___
> > Sugar-devel mailing list
> > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
> --
> Srevin Saju
> Sugar Labs
> https://www.sugarlabs.org
>
>
> ___
> Sugar-devel mailing list
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> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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