[openbeos] Communication and you
- From: Michael Phipps <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:07:10 -0400
Wow. I get sick for a couple of days and this place explodes...
Where do I begin?
How about with some history, for those who weren't here.
When we started OpenBeOS, my plan was that we would have 15 or so teams,
each with a strong leader. Those teams would develop in isolation,
mostly, building R5 replacements that could just plug and play. So,
logically, there was an admin list for the team leads and a list for
each team.
For a number of reasons, this both worked and didn't work as well as I
might have hoped. I built infrastructure to support a team of around
100. We have a team of closer to 10. As a result of that, some of the
infrastructure has gone to waste (like, say, the kernel team mailing
list). Other parts have been somewhat re-purposed. Like the admin list.
The admin list has hosted discussions that might have made more sense in
the "low bandwidth developers" mailing list that we DON'T have because
we were going to have 15 different ones. There is a lot more cross-
pollination (which is a good thing), but sometimes some people get left
out of things that would be helpful. That is bad.
Over time, we have grown methods of discussion for various reasons. The
forums came about with the new website. The wiki later. Now, as has been
correctly realized (and I have been beating this horse for a long time),
we have WAY too many ways to communicate. Part of the plan was for the
new website to fix this.
The new website has been a long time in coming. We have looked at, tried
and/or tested out, I think, every CMS out there. They all suck. Really.
I think that they were all written by the Windows ME kernel team with
help from the FreeBSD installer UI team. :-) Drupal was the best of a
bad set of choices. Now that we have made the choice, we are going
forward as quickly as we can.
To me, the best of both worlds would be a forum/mailing list hybrid,
sort of like gmane but better, wherein you could login and post and
read, but optionally tie that to a mailing list so you could work from
email if you would prefer that. I haven't seen anything that will do
that today. Mailman is 1/2 way there. Most of the forums are 1/2 way there.
We don't need an official site and a wiki and forums and mailing lists.
The question is, what do you cut? I tend toward cutting the wiki and the
forums. Self host the mailing lists and post the archives. Maybe
"someday" we can build in a secure posting gateway.
I would also like to self-host all of our mailing lists. Our hosting
solution makes this easy, we just have to decide to do it as part of the
new site. This is not a criticism of any of our hosting for our mailing
lists, but I think that it would be more professional looking, to say
the least. Especially since we have changed our name... :-)
As far as the contests - they both come from need. We honestly DON'T
have a Creative Design Team in any reality. For the most part, when we
had one, the results were not very impressive. One "real" designer did a
lot better work than most of the community submissions. That is part of
the reason that I have not been overly optimistic about a Marketing/
Communications team. Everyone can download GIMP and make sort of cool
looking stuff. Even me. :-) Likewise, there are many voices as to what
Marcom should look like, even within the Marcom community. Since I have
the benefit of a communications professional who is volunteering (/me
looks at Koki), I will certainly take advantage of that situation. :-D
Honestly, we are open. Really open. Way open. Crazy open. More open than
any significant OSS project out there, unless I have missed someone
somewhere. Sometimes that seems like a mistake, since we do have issues
like this where incomplete ideas or concepts get out into the "wild" and
confuse people. But I also think that is a good thing. I hear a lot of
"there is no news". There is, if you look for it. But we also don't want
to talk above what is real. I prefer the Apple approach (announce what
you have working) to the Microsoft (announce what you think you might
possibly finish someday) approach.
We need to focus on developers right now. We need more of them, both for
apps and for OS development. What we don't really need is a big flood of
people who want to play with the next Linux distro. If marcom can help
us get the right people, I am more than interested. If not, then this is
not the right time for it.
OK - this is getting seriously long. This set of threads has pointed
out, vehemently (and violently?) what we have known for a while - that
we need to redo our public facing materials. It has been in progress
since January, believe it or not. Can we summarize this with this -
message received. Give us a month or so and if you don't see
improvement, scream out?
Michael
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