On 8/16/06, Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Forums are great places to "chit-chat" amongst community members in a very abstract way. The one thing I would definitely clarify here is that the forums should be nothing official. They can serve as an informal area to meet and discuss with other haiku community members - but not a place to make any decisions or official announcements. If that was made clear, I think they could still be useful in the future as an "extra" that the community gets if they desire it.
I think that the HUGs or some central community site (in multiple languages, replacing the current HUGs?) should be responsible for this. The community site could offer additional services (Michael always mentioned ".Mac"). Just some examples: * email accounts with AJAX-based very easy to use webmail client (maybe reusing concepts from googlemail) * address book * sync your Haiku address book and appointments with the community site * maybe a BFS-like network file system service (Ingo is developing a network FS add-on) * share files, contacts, emails, appointments with other members * collaborate (VoIP?, desktop sharing, remote access, plan meetings, ...) * community projects * software repos (like BeBits, but integrated with an automated Haiku update service and focused on freeware and open-source) * SpreadHaiku and other marketing related work (representing the official Haiku Marketing Project) * board for non-developer volunteers (translate, document, test, etc.) * personal community blog (my experience with Haiku) * secret Haiku tricks and how to become more productive * your personal Haiku Community homepage
The wiki is harder to define. I personally LOVE the dynamic/collaborative nature of it. Haiku's wiki is the first one I've ever really contributed to, and I now see why this is quickly becoming such a common knowledge-management tool. The wiki allows many people to refine a single source of networked content easily and with extremely powerful features.
The wiki is nice because more people start contributing, but seriously, the content is not very high quality and it's often too hard to find. The problem is that *anyone* can contribute. It's not at all organized.
Waldemar tells me that Drupal also has a "revision" tracking system that is still buggy, and if this can be used in the future, maybe the wiki will be unnecessary. One of the positive features of the wiki is that it is open by default. Anyone can contribute collaboratively
Not Drupal is buggy. It's a plugin which we're using ("Similar entries"). It doesn't take revisions into account, so there might be multiple occurences of the same node in the list of similar entries. The module is here: http://drupal.org/node/25974 The bug report is here: http://drupal.org/node/69822 There is a patch, but it needs testing.
I think many of these marketing materials are available now - and just need to be used (even abused) more heavily to generate buzz. We should at all times make a very clear statement that Haiku is NOT YET ready for end-users - while at the same time showing that it has made great progress and has overcome many hurdles and desires more developers to assist in completing and improving it.
The problem is that some users might see that Haiku doesn't yet have USB support and a working netstack and decide to "come back in two years...if at all". We want to give users a good impression ("nice, but needs more polish..."), so they come back more often.
Bye, Waldemar Kornewald
