Re: A few observations about GIMPNET

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 8:08 PM, Andrea Veri <av gnome org> wrote:
> 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

Again, how do you expect to achieve this hypothetical migration ?

You will post a memo and people will just happily follow the
foundation's decree ?

I think you've misunderstood how things work in the real world.
Unless you actually pull the plug on GimpNET, which would probably
make at least a few of us sad, you will get a situation where possibly
some projects will follow you, most will remain where they've always
been comfortable, and you will get a situation of segregation, where
we used to be all united in GimpNET, now half of the projects will
be chatting on Freenode.

> 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.

Right, many people join irc for help... they find our irc channels
because we indicate them in our various project websites.

Regards,
             -Tristan