Re: Pre-release marketing and community management [Was: getting www.gnome3.org]

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:32 AM, Dave Neary wrote:
>     Ah... I'm not a big fan of buffers. I prefer trying to quieten people
>     down when they're distracting. That means channelling the noise
>     elsewhere, and perhaps taking a slightly drastic measure of moderating
>     all posts to d-d-l for a few months.

<snip>

> If you moderate, you'll have a lot more angry people since it seems like
> you're trying to shut them up.

<ahem> But we are. desktop-devel-list is supposed to be a list for
desktop development. Not bitching about desktop development. The whole
reason it was created was to get away from gnome-list. There is no place
for non-developers complaining to developers there. That's what bugzilla
is for.

Yes, if you're defining "developers" as maintainers of core modules.  Unfortunately, people will go into deskop-devel because there is no community mailing list that they can go to.  So they will participate in the forum that they believe has the audience they seek.  Unless you close DDL of course.
 

We should moderate the list, because its members are not
self-moderating. We should ensure that there is a really good forum
where people can go complain into the ether - we'll hear about it every
now & again when we mess up really badly because someone syndicated on
pgo will point to a forum post.

How about creating a forum or something and keep such people out of the regular mailing lists instead? 
 

> Olav did something similar
> for Lefty on the foundation-list.  That is a good example of managing
> the mailing list.

I think it's a really bad example, actually. How much disruption was
caused by people on foundation-list before any action was taken? Far too
much I would say.

Well you really can't over moderate foundation list.  Those people are well part of the foundation and our audience to some extent.  They are on there because they've made some contribution in some way.

Stormy has warned Lefty before over private mail.  A public beating was warranted.
 

> It's imperative we let them talk and just as
> imperative we respond with data.  And continue to respond.  This wears
> out devs but it won't wear us down we're emotionally geared for it.

Speak for yourself :) I am as emotionally worn down as anyone, and at
some stage your answer has to be "put up or shut up. What gives you a
sense of entitlement?"

I'm not really that worn down.  If you are, you're emotionally investing too much into it.  I think once we have ordered information in hand, published it will get a lot easier to stop trolling.  Right now, we don't have those things and we need to fix that.  That's our job here.  We have some plans here and we got some resources, let's get it done.
 

>     * There appears to be cognitive dissonance between the resources that
>     some GNOME people believe are there for maintenance and the resources
>     that are actually there - esp. related to fallback mode - panel +
>     applets + metacity.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this point regarding maintenance.  Are you
> referring to the maintenance of gnome 2.0?

Specifically, I'm referring to the mixed messaging around the fallback
GNOME. Is it a deliberately pared down GNOME 2? Are significant modules
not being migrated by design? Or is it simply that there are no
developer resources to maintain the panel applets or Orca for the GNOME
3 fallback, and if people were to do the work then patches would be
welcome? Is it a design issue, or a resources issue?

I'm still sort of annoyed that the Orca question was not yet answered.  I wish Vincent and the release team will address that soon.  I agree that the fallback Gnome situation is murky.  I think I liked Owen stance, that failback mode should be Gnome 3 based with a panel.  I would like to see someone try to port it before release.  I've been told that it was a resource issue and that there is no objection that I can tell to having applets.  I think Owen wasn't against it at all from what I've read.  I think if Owen thinks that then that is the stance.  Perhaps we can talk with the release team behind the scenes and get clarification.  We might as well address this now.  We only have a couple of months left to get this working correctly.

> I think as I pointed out before, not everything is going to be feature
> complete at launch.  It will take some cycles before we are on par with
> Gnome 2.x.  That especially is important since a lot of people expect to
> just change over.  A document on who should switch might be in order.

Especially since "avoiding major functionality regressions" was a big
motivator behind the GNOME 3 development. Early on we said "we're not
going to have a KDE 4".

I think in that case, they were talking about API and ABI breakage.  We didn't want people to port their apps to a completely new platform like what KDE4 did.  That's a cruel thing to do to app developers.  Remember how long it took Gnucash to get ported to 2.0?  So regressions was always from a development platform perspective.  From a user perspective we were making changes to the Ui constantly over the life of 2.0.  Gnome 2.4 is functionally different than Gnome 2.18.  We wanted to completely overhaul the UI experience and that's where shell came into play.  So how we worked with the desktop changed, and yet we didn't have to do anything to port the applications to the new experience. 

sri