Re: Revitalizing the Urban Center of GNOME

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 00:09 -0500, Seth Nickell wrote:

> Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that
> its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list,
> you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a
> thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not,
> asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of
> time. 

I totally agree with this. Its sad how so many core maintainers have
unsubscribed from important shared lists. I personally still subscribe
to this list, but I don't read much of it. There just isn't any channel
where the gnome developers can communicate about project-wide issues and
plans in a sane way any more.

Historically Gnome has always had a strategy for problems like this.
Whenever a channel had too low signal-to-noice ratio we'd create a new
one, and somehow only the core people knew about it initially. Witness
gnome-hackers -> desktop-devel-list or #gnome -> #gnome-hackers.
It only works for some time though, and I think sometimes we loose
important people in these moves. Its time we tried to solve this problem
in a better way.

Its quite hard to get this changed though. We're all nice people,  none
of us likes to tell people off. And if one of us tries (like mark did a
while ago) he'll get into endless discussions about censorship and free
speech (contributing more noise, driving more people away).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a war-weary one-eyed photographer with a robot buddy named Sparky. She's 
a mistrustful motormouth politician in the witness protection program. They 
fight crime!