Re: community input...

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi.


On Thu, 2017-12-28 at 22:26 -0300, Felipe Ferreira da Silva wrote:
>  but I think the lack of a more accessible medium of communication is
> required.
I don't think it gets more accessible than email and IRC.
At least from the technical side of things.
Email has been around for as long as the Internet exists. We have
tooling to deal with it and it's not going away anytime soon.
IRC is an open enough protocol with many different clients serving
different needs.

I do see that the UX around these tools is not necessarily what pleases
people nowadays.  And I may even go as far and claim that email is not
going to be fixed anytime soon.  But with open technologies like email
and IRC, we can control most of the UX around it.

> **Lists**
>
> There is a large number of lists, and some of them not used for a long
> time.
Yeah, that's a problem indeed.

>  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).
yeah, true indeed. It's not very discoverable how to do so.
I believe I read somewhere that mailman 3 makes this easier.

>  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).
Right. But I assume that this is not a problem inherent to mailing lists
but rather the advertisement around the communication channels.

> **IRC**
> [...]
>  However, I can't stay for a long time active on IRC
yeah, IRC is a tool for near real time communication. If you're not able
to do that, then it's probably the wrong tool.

My impression is that we expanded the number of communication channels
with the growth of the project but haven't scaled down whenever the
project shrank.  It might be worthwhile to go through the mailing lists,
IRC channels, Wiki pages, Bugzilla components, and so on, and evaluate
whether we can reduce the overhead by removing some options.

Cheers,
  Tobi