Re: community input...

[Felipe Ferreira da Silva <ferreiradaselvadev gmail com>]

I should add...

The GitLab migration is (maybe) a solution. About that:

1) GitLab is project-focused. Where should discussions that are not focused on a single project go? Or new proposals, and newcomers projects?

This is an obstacle for new potential devs, but https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME-Community has the **engagement** repo, an example of non project-focused place for discussion. Maybe that could be extended to others repositories, for example:

**general proposals** proposals that are not for a single project, but for all the GNOME projects.

**newcomers projects** a place where people that make Gtk+ apps could open a thread and tell what their project is about. This could be a place for fishing projects that has potential to be part of GNOME or just share snippets of code that could be of wide use, etc.

... and so on.

2) It is developer-focused. Basically, non-developers creating a GitLab account is an obstacle. So, it should be kept in mind that while GitLab might help developers engage, it blocks non-developers.

3) All this GitLab migration (or migration to any other medium) is worth nothing if developers use them only as repository, but not for engagement.

Best regards,

Felipe Ferreira da Silva

On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 10:26 PM, Felipe Ferreira da Silva <ferreiradaselvadev gmail com> wrote:

Hi, about the discussion regarding community input...

I share the same opinion of what was already told, but I think the lack of a more accessible medium of communication is required. And I mean something else other than mailing list and IRC.

**Lists**

There is a large number of lists, and some of them not used for a long time. Just parsing through some, I found some that doesn't have a single message for years. This makes harder to find the proper list to post, too. This message, I can't even reply on the original thread, because I just subscribed the list (at least one an obvious one). And all the lists are for a specific project. This means projects that are already part of GNOME has a place, but projects that could potentially be part, no (at least, again, not an obvious one).

**IRC**

About IRC. I've been there countless times. Mostly, not for seeking help, but because I would like to make some of my projects to be part of GNOME (the way I see, they would be a good addition). However, I can't stay for a long time active on IRC, and I don't want to really rely on those servers to keep me connected 24h. It takes a long time for someone to reply (happens to me and others that I see asking help). And, even when it happens, the discussion doesn't grow, because many people are away from the keyboard. After that, I just give up. I don't mean this is a problem caused by the devs (everyone has their problems and their lives), but caused by the tool used for communication. If there was a tool with persistent chat, the wait wouldn't be a problem, and would make discussions more accessible to everyone. If you just logged in on IRC, you won't see the past discussion, but you will if it's on a persistent chat, like a forum forum platform.

I know many people are fond of those two tools, but keep in mind that they are not very accessible and keep people away. Like Nacho said, I could be an active collaborator by now, too, yet, here I am with no contributions.

Best regards,

Felipe Ferreira da Silva