Re: A few observations about GIMPNET

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Sebastian Keller <sebastian-keller gmx de> wrote:

I have seen people on #gnome on freenode asking for the official
channels of gnome components, but those were very very few and almost
all of them were asking for support and not how to contribute to
development. (Assuming they tried #gnome after they found out #gnome-*
does not exist) The only exception was #gtk+ but nobody was interested
in development of gtk just development with gtk.

This is true.  I occasionally monitor #gnome on freenode and it is primarily about support and asking questions and we have two excellent volunteers who are covering that and they currently administer the channel for me.

Og and I are the ones who have admin access to the gnome-* channels on freenode.   We occasionally get requests for non gnome related channels like #gnome-do.

This is also a general observation, most people who join the freenode
channel are looking for support - and more people join the freenode
#gnome channel rather than the gimpnet one when asking for support.
(Despite there being more people on the gimpnet one most of the time,
but that is because most of those leave after they got support)

Pretty much.
 

If there were many more #gnome-* channels on freenode that would
probably make it harder to provide support, because that would mean
having to follow every of those channels.

We'd still need a set of opers to administrate all the channels.  We'd be doing teh same thing, although we would have a lot of extra tools at our disposal to administrate, but we would still still need bodies to do it which makes us no worse or better than having our own IRC.

For the record, I enjoy having our own IRC network.  Most of you know that I have taken full advantage over the years of spouting off without the general public to see.

We have our own culture in these channels and it's worth preserving.  It's not as strong as it used to be but hey such as it is.  It's our own tent.

It might be interesting to ask KDE folks what their experience has been being on freenode.
 

Another useful thing about having gnome channels on a separate network
is that LIST can actually be used to find channels. I'm not just talking
about searching channels but also discovering them by simply browsing
the list.

I'm not sure if that's compelling.   On freenode, I can pretty much guess where I want to go if I want support for something. 
 

That being said I also can see how it would be more convenient to have
all free software channels on the same network. I have no strong opinion
on either way but I just wanted to point out that the argument about
getting more contributors is not really a strong one.

I agree.

I rather we concentrate on how to improve GimpNET.  I confess that I don't really understand the problem statement here.  Are we being spammed a lot or is there trouble that we cannot fix quickly?  Are we searching for a solution without defining the problem?

sri