Re: Pre-release marketing and community management [Was: getting www.gnome3.org]

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:32 AM, Dave Neary wrote:
>     Ah... I'm not a big fan of buffers. I prefer trying to quieten people
>     down when they're distracting. That means channelling the noise
>     elsewhere, and perhaps taking a slightly drastic measure of moderating
>     all posts to d-d-l for a few months.

<snip>

> If you moderate, you'll have a lot more angry people since it seems like
> you're trying to shut them up.

<ahem> But we are. desktop-devel-list is supposed to be a list for
desktop development. Not bitching about desktop development. The whole
reason it was created was to get away from gnome-list. There is no place
for non-developers complaining to developers there. That's what bugzilla
is for.

We should moderate the list, because its members are not
self-moderating. We should ensure that there is a really good forum
where people can go complain into the ether - we'll hear about it every
now & again when we mess up really badly because someone syndicated on
pgo will point to a forum post.

> Olav did something similar
> for Lefty on the foundation-list.  That is a good example of managing
> the mailing list.

I think it's a really bad example, actually. How much disruption was
caused by people on foundation-list before any action was taken? Far too
much I would say.

> It's imperative we let them talk and just as
> imperative we respond with data.  And continue to respond.  This wears
> out devs but it won't wear us down we're emotionally geared for it.

Speak for yourself :) I am as emotionally worn down as anyone, and at
some stage your answer has to be "put up or shut up. What gives you a
sense of entitlement?"

>     * There appears to be cognitive dissonance between the resources that
>     some GNOME people believe are there for maintenance and the resources
>     that are actually there - esp. related to fallback mode - panel +
>     applets + metacity.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this point regarding maintenance.  Are you
> referring to the maintenance of gnome 2.0?

Specifically, I'm referring to the mixed messaging around the fallback
GNOME. Is it a deliberately pared down GNOME 2? Are significant modules
not being migrated by design? Or is it simply that there are no
developer resources to maintain the panel applets or Orca for the GNOME
3 fallback, and if people were to do the work then patches would be
welcome? Is it a design issue, or a resources issue?

> I think as I pointed out before, not everything is going to be feature
> complete at launch.  It will take some cycles before we are on par with
> Gnome 2.x.  That especially is important since a lot of people expect to
> just change over.  A document on who should switch might be in order.

Especially since "avoiding major functionality regressions" was a big
motivator behind the GNOME 3 development. Early on we said "we're not
going to have a KDE 4".

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org