Re: Gnome community

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

c. schwarm wrote:
> On the other hand, the forums and its active members already shield bugzilla
> and mailing lists from too much noise - it catched a lot of frustration
> about spacial nautilus, for example.

I noticed that you mention "the forum" and "desktop notes" as
being two different things - I assumed that that gnomedesktop.org 
was what you meant by the forum, but it seems I was wrong... what 
is the forum?

> >From my experience, if a core team member needs to answer questions such as
> "Should I use bonobo", this hints on a lack of "middle men" in the
> organization - the role of sargents and such in the army.

Middle men and documentation :)

> This is one reason why GNOME's "social abstraction layer" is too small in
> relation to our user base, IMHO. I believe, this is what KDE manages better
> because they build the better (web) infrastructure.

I don't think that the cheerleading base is small, but I do think
that it isn't funnelled - right now there is not a clear GNOME
community site like spreadfirefox (why do we keep comparing
things to mozilla? Because for the last year they have done so
much right). But now even spreadfirefox is losing value, because
a lot of the things coming up on the forums have come up before,
and they're hitting the classic problem open source and free
software projects have always had - managing knowledge bases.
Your information needs to be 
1) Easily discoverable
2) Filterable
3) Pertinent

That means having one site for docs, which has a well thought out
hierarchy, and a search facility. And that site needs to be
pointed to *everywhere* - want to know whether you should use
Bonobo? Go look at the bonobo section of the knowledge base.
Can't figure out how to contribute to GNOME? Go look in the
Helping out section of the knowledge base. Want to get some tutorials
on common tasks in GNOME? Go to the "getting started" section of
the knowledge base. 

This needs to be complimented with one, and only one,
slashdot-type site for GNOME news and user feedback, which gets 
syndicated on the sidebar of the web page, and one (and only 
one) planet, which gets aggregated on the sidebar of the web page. 

You would end up with the same style sheets and the same sidebar
for all gnome.org pages. So your news items are available on all
pages, as are your planet entries.

Right now our major problem is taht here, we are not talking to
the right people. We're not talking to the web team, we're not
talking to the forum admins, we're not talking to the
gnomedesktop people or gnomefiles people or any others. That
conversation needs to start first :) I'd suggest going through
foundation-list for something like this - we don't really have a
central website for community type issues right now (perhaps
that's part of the problem, but then who would subscribe?).

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
        David Neary,
        Lyon, France
   E-Mail: bolsh gimp org
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/