[Ilugc] Are Indian FOSS communities closed-source ?
- From: sankarshan.mukhopadhyay@xxxxxxxxx (Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay)
- Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 14:55:07 +0530
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 3:48 PM, shirish <shirish at hamaralinux.org> wrote:
That was just one part of it. What would you say then about issue in
wikipedia India where there were two forks? And the issue is not limited
to wikipedia alone, for some - it comes to the fore, in others it just
below the surface. The problem is it's easy to be shot as the messenger
when you say something like that. Also any example or examples can
easily be construed to be straw man examples as well.
I am not sure where the messenger is being shot at. I am asking the
messenger to pass along specifics of the message unbiased by personal
anecdotes. With regards to the Wikipedia situation you call out - have
you asked on the relevant lists about what it means to have "forks"?
Also, why do you term these as 'forks'?
Straw-man examples wouldn't buttress your hypothesis, would they? As
much as I appreciate the fact that you took time to write this up, I
am perplexed that you continue to respond in "I do have more context
but that is not in share-ready form" manner through the post and this
response.
The specific example that I shared with you was for another community
but the point is/was these kind of issues are prevalent in most
communities.
Even if you take calendaring, I doubt that most of the LUGs either have
their own calendar or even attempt to reach out to various other LUGs
when events happen on some common calendaring system, the same could be
said for special interest groups as well.
Calendaring is an utility (in both the colloquial form of the word and
the economic interpretation). And it is somewhat of a stretch to
consider the LUGs across the country to be decision driven bodies. At
best they have some legal structure, at worst these are continually
ad-hoc formations around a small nucleus of individuals.
And I wouldn't even go into the sort of moderation some of the
communities apply for something basic as mailing lists although it was
heartening to see PLUG change its tactics, although somewhat too little,
too late :( .
I am not very sure how PLUG's moderation is relevant to this
discussion. If it is, please explain.
Meetup.com is not a solution for the problem per-se. And it is not an
issue of "maker approach" only, if you look at meetup.com as a probable
solution, it is a jungle because all sorts of communities are meeting.
You have chosen to selectively respond to the paragraph. However, why
is meetup.com not a solution to the problem?
For instance, while it would be somewhat easy to know of SIG's, but if I
wanted to have a list of all FOSS groups (which include SIG's) all over
India, that's a sort of next to impossible task.
The idea that there will be a directory of SIGs which would be off
immense interest to an individual does have merit. However, your
statement seems to be from the perspective of a potential consumer of
such a service and not the maintainer of one. There are enough such
problem statements formulated around "Oh! I wish we had this ..." and
often they are translated into a business/revenue opportunity.
I wish there was a way to hack meetup to get info. on even all tech
meetups in India but that's also not possible. I have to give a city
name to get some listing happening :(
And what is wrong with that? A monster directly of all meetups
happening today across India seems like an interesting exercise but
not something which would benefit one individual (you aren't expected
to be at all places at the same time). A stretched analogy would be
that you don't get the availability of all cabs across all the cities
when you use any particular operator's mobile device.
Meetups are local and even hyper-local. It isn't a mart.
Also not all the communities either know or have persons who could
manage meetup.com because it becomes another site to look at for events
apart from facebook,lwn.net, twitter.com, mailing lists etc. etc.
There are communities which use both facebook and meetup as a dumping
ground for events and there is nobody to answer even simple queries.
Examples would help. I keep repeating this and you seem to choose to
ignore this point. Hand-wavy statements often lead to conclusions one
wishes to reach.
I wish there was something like lwn.net for India which would be neutral
place where people could post event stuff and be able to gather intel on
all FOSS events happening in the country, do accept that don't have any
ideas on the subject other than to have something similar like that
albeit on the regional (India) scale.
I am amused with this "for India" thing. At one point you seem to
indicate that "for India" communities are worse places than the "other
than India" ones. At other instances you prefer a "for India"
implementation. LWN.net would not be averse to listing the events. It
requires actual people to do the listing. They do not happen by
sprinkling magic pixie dust in air. The catch is that there aren't
actual people willing to do this.
I was not talking about the upstreams of projects, I was talking more of
lateral integration as in getting more people in your community as well
as talking to other communities per-se.
Please provide an example to demonstrate what is it that you see as a gap.
This discussion can be of material interest only if there is enough
specific examples discussed (with names redacted, if required) and
thereafter conclusions drawn.
I don't want to go there as this will just in-flame the issue more.
Then don't make statements which you don't want to back up with
citations. It would help in more ways than you can imagine.
--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<
https://about.me/sankarshan.mukhopadhyay>
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