Re: A few observations about GIMPNET

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2012/10/15 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
> hi;
>
> On 15 October 2012 11:32, Andrea Veri <av gnome org> wrote:
>> 2012/10/15 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
>>
>>> have we had any indication that being on irc.gnome.org is in any way,
>>> shape, or form preventing people from contributing to GNOME - and that
>>> moving to freenode would open the floodgates to new contributors?
>>
>> Freenode has more than 80000 users and I'm pretty much sure a lot of
>> new contributors willing to join the GNOME Project are looking for
>> #gnome-* channels there and not on GIMPNET which is a network with
>> less than 2000 users connected per day, it's a matter of numbers.
>
> again, that's like saying that we ought to move to GitHub or Gitorious
> because "they have more users than git.gnome.org". it's an obviously
> true statement: freenode, like GitHub, hosts a ton of projects; the
> statement above, though, forgets that there are branding reasons
> associated with having infrastructure under the *.gnome.org domain, as
> well as historical ones.
>
> plus, I have yet to see the justification for the "if you move it,
> they will come" attitude. we're already exposed to more users than the
> 80 thousands on freenode: it's not the IRC network that makes them
> contribute to our project (we'd also be self-selecting against the
> subset of users that know or use IRC); users join irc.gnome.org
> *after* they start contributing to GNOME.

We can't predict now the number of users that will join #gnome-*
channels after the hypothetical migration but we can make some
previsions based on the number of users each network has. The
questions are: did the GIMPNET network grow that much during all these
years? and if not, why? how can we help newcomers to find us in a
better way? the last question is interesting, many IRC clients put
huge networks as their first choices on channel's list and that means
one thing: a completely new user that first joins IRC will probably
connect to Freenode and will probably try to find us there without
success)

I don't agree with you with "users join irc.gnome.org *after* they
start contributing to GNOME", many people join IRC to find some help,
to increase their experience within GNOME and most of the times if
they find an helpful contributor they get their issue addressed and
they will probably be more prospicent to contribute to the project in
the future as a give-back.

cheers,

Andrea