[openbeos] Re: The importance of good communications
- From: "Niels Reedijk" <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:55:08 +0000
Hi Stephan,
to me it feels like you are making "claims". There *are* official channels
for information. It's this list, and most certainly the commit list. You can
write News Letter articles, though I agree they are no substitute for a blog.
It might feel like claims, but they are a lived experience for people
in the margins like me. I have seen several attempts over the past
year(s?) of people trying to get involved. Every time they are send
away with the message that 'networking' needs work. They go to a list,
ask the question again and eventually bail out. Is it impossible to
get involved? No, I'm reasonably informed, follow multiple lists and
keep an eye on the svn repository, and I do know what needs to be
done. But if I consider the number of sources I have to check upon
daily to get my updates, I sometimes wonder whether we're doing it all
right.
You say the developers might be too busy with helping people out. I
think they're too busy because they have to go through the same
information sources (and perhaps even more) as I. We're supporting an
artificial segregation into teams, where in fact there are none. How
many truely active developers are there? 5 ? 10? 15? I doubt there are
20. The website has forums for 19 teams. If you take 20 as the number
of developers you have on average 1.05 people per team.
I believe that many good things can come out of discussion, such as
the progress that was made to the discussion on the icon contest - or
whatever it's called now. But by imposing limits by means of teams,
you're limiting the amount of involvement they show in other
discussions. Of course there are no written rules on commenting on
other people's stuff, but it does mean that you need to be subscribed
to many mailing lists. Why do we make input so hard? Someone that's
working on the storage kit might have a nice job for a volunteer who
wants to contribute something to the network team.
The new website should make it possible for every developer to have his own
blog right on the official Haiku site. The Team mailing lists are a way to
classify information and to subscribe only to the stuff you're interested in.
What is the problem with subscribing to more than one mailing list?
There is little problem with subscribing to multiple mailing lists,
but the perfect task for someone lurking on the network mailinglist
might be posted on the app_server mailing list. I seriously doubt that
the amount of traffic on a unified development list (sans svn commits)
would be overwhelming. That's what filters and delete buttons are for.
BTW: I found it weird that you first rant about spread out information, then
later propose to create *another* place for having discussions about stuff
like icons.
Did I? I just wanted to say that I don't think every little detail
would have to be discussed. To hook in on Axel's mail: no, you won't
have to log every little IRC conversation, every phone call, every p2p
meeting, or every visit to the stripclub. It's just that as soon as
there's a topic that needs a wider audience it's "we'll post it on
haiku-core-devel". It shouldn't be of general interest, even a
networking problem might be enough. The right person for your problem
might be waiting for you.
The new website should hopefully be more community driven. So that efforts
like "Weekly Haiku" don't have to be created somewhere else.
You mean the same community that's starting to have some doubts?
Koki's questions about the communication, seem to me to be a symptom
of the problem that is caused by the lack of centralised information.
Urias complains that there isn't enough support for tasks other than
coding. That's the effect of the lack of a single point where the
people that belong to the core developers mix with everybody else.
The division in teams is a legacy from the start of the project where
OpenBeOS would be a simple but effective replacement of BeOS. It would
be finished in two years. Guess how long it's been now and how long
it's going to take. Perhaps it's time to rethink the way the resources
of the developers are distributed, and how to make better use of the
people that want to get involved.
That's my vision anyway. From where I stand now, the position I'm in,
I wholeheartedly can tell that the current ideas on creating a
productive community fail. I seriously hope you don't take this as
personal criticism, but rather as a brainstorm of ideas of how to
handle things better.
Have fun!
Niels
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