Re: Gnome community

["c. schwarm" <c schwarm gmx net>]

Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:

> Yup. There was a complaint in another thread on this list last night
> that the core developers don't participate in forums, etc.
> Realistically, that's just not possible- too many places, too many
> faces, too few hours in the day. 

Since I was the one "complaining" ;), maybe I should elaborate: I know, core
devs have no time to *really* participate in the forum.

On the other hand, the forums and its active members already shield bugzilla
and mailing lists from too much noise - it catched a lot of frustration
about spacial nautilus, for example.

If devs from the planet would just answer one question in a month under a
nickname that can be recognized, I believe the forum could grow and do even
more.

There is a reason that Ubuntu's _forum_ was voted as one of the most
friendly comunities, not their mailing lists.

> > Someone mentioned KDE - what do they do better than us from this
> > point of view?
>
> No idea. I know they have their cabal-y groups as well, but I'd bet
> the better docs and lower technical barrier to entry makes it easier
> to deal with newbies- I know some of the Elder Gods of GNOME devel are
> sick of answering questions ('should I use bonobo?') that if someone
> merely wrote better docs they wouldn't see nearly as much.

> From my experience, if a core team member needs to answer questions such as
"Should I use bonobo", this hints on a lack of "middle men" in the
organization - the role of sargents and such in the army.

You may call it a sort of "social abstraction layer" that shields the core
team. :D

> > Can we change to do that? Do we already have teh
> > infrastructure, but people don't know about it?
>
> It's hard to call this an 'infrastructure'- it's about people going
> out and doing the 1-on-1 work to encourage and cheerlead. But yeah,
> what little infrastructure is needed, we don't have :)

One needs motivation to go out and cheerlead. If these efforts are not
respected, you soon have noone cheerleading anymore. Unfortunatly, there's
no bug account for cheerleading: You can't add numbers how much somebody
cheerleaded. If GNOME's core dev team is unable to watch this space and pick
the right people, we'll loose them.

This is one reason why GNOME's "social abstraction layer" is too small in
relation to our user base, IMHO. I believe, this is what KDE manages better
because they build the better (web) infrastructure.

Hopefully, my post from yesterday is more clear now.


Cheers,

Claus

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