Re: Gnome community

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

[Not really appropriate for marketing list, but what the hell...]
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:56:07 +0100, David Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
> The point that was made earlier is a good one, though - there
> does appear to be a smallish barrier to entry into the community
> from the developer community point of view.

It's not small, it is pretty damn high, really. You have to have
serious commitment to worm your way into the core community.

> It's certainly a lot
> lower than on some projects but part of the problem is atht we
> have too many ways to talk to each other, so a core hacker group
> has to concentrate on the ones that allow the project to best
> move forward (or which allow them to get the most work done) -
> and that means devel mailing lists, planet gnome as a diffusion
> of current cool stuff and "meeting of minds", irc and jabber
> for real-time interraction, and that's about it. I know that I
> don't have much time to read gnomedesktop (although it is above
> slashdot in my priorities) and I usually don't read comments on
> stories at all.

Yup. There was a complaint in another thread on this list last night
that the core developers don't participate in forums, etc.
Realistically, that's just not possible- too many places, too many
faces, too few hours in the day. Sadly, this gets worse when you get
paid, not better, since you don't get to choose your own priorities,
and if you've been working on some g* project for 10 hours during the
day, your motivation to go home and read forums with newbies and poor
signal-to-noise is pretty low.

> Have we gotten to the stage where we need level 1 community
> support, the people who take care of making it easy for people to
> talk to each other and get involved, but don't actually do any
> hacking? That way, the hackers who don't have the time have a
> smaller bunch of people in kind of fuzzily defined areas with
> whom they interract regularly for community interraction stuff
> (the "in" crowd), who spend lots of time nurturing a community
> who feels like it's being listened to (the "out" crowd)?

This is something I used to do fairly successfully through the
bugsquad. It is a very useful and important function, IMHO, but it is
hard to do. :/ The best thought I can give is that we need more
bugdays and things like that- the few gnome-love days seemed like a
great step in this direction.

> Someone mentioned KDE - what do they do better than us from this
> point of view?

No idea. I know they have their cabal-y groups as well, but I'd bet
the better docs and lower technical barrier to entry makes it easier
to deal with newbies- I know some of the Elder Gods of GNOME devel are
sick of answering questions ('should I use bonobo?') that if someone
merely wrote better docs they wouldn't see nearly as much.

> Can we change to do that? Do we already have teh
> infrastructure, but people don't know about it?

It's hard to call this an 'infrastructure'- it's about people going
out and doing the 1-on-1 work to encourage and cheerlead. But yeah,
what little infrastructure is needed, we don't have :)

Luis