Hi Ted,
<quote> Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions? </quote>
I think we're doing OK in both respects - certainly, I found Inkscape welcoming when I started out as a bug triager and then as a developer. However, I think the developer and user communities are largely separate entities who communicate in different circles (e.g., devs on the mailing list/Launchpad/IRC; users on DeviantArt & Facebook). I'd favour encouraging the existence of more of a "sliding scale" between user and developer, in which everyone is encouraged to contribute to the project if they wish, at whichever technical level they feel comfortable. That could be anything from contributing artwork to a gallery and spreading the word on social media, through to triaging bugs, translating or contributing code. I think we're getting better at this, now that we have a nice website with increasingly dynamic content... I hope it encourages the communities to meet around a common forum. We could, though, do more to (a) help and encourage users who want to contribute more deeply and (b) encourage more of a dialogue between the developers and the general (non-technical) community. This could include setting up Twitter/Reddit Q&A sessions, creating more tutorials (videos?) for new contributors, and supporting informal face-to-face user forums in a few cities. I think the board can play a role in shaping these initiatives and coordinating funding to start things off where appropriate.
Best wishes,
Alex
On 20 August 2015 at 21:01, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 09:40 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
Question for the candidates:
Inkscape has tried to be welcoming to both developer and non-developer contributions to the project. Do you think the project has been successful there? Is it getting better or worse? What could/should we do to recognize or encourage non-developer contributions?
Thanks Ted, great question.
Inkscape's communities are strong where they have had a place to grow. There's been a few issue with fragmentation historically from two places.
The first is the core project not being receptive to or not having the capacity to host useful and official spaces for a community to grow up. Because of this we have some inkscape communities which are quite disconnected from a main body.
The second problem has been the duplication of some services. This seemed to be mostly an issue with sourceforge, having forums, repositories are other things floating around in search results meant potential contributors hitting dead ends.
A successful community will be one where all the various community spaces we host have good solid links between all other spaces. Where integration is strongest and well defined, duplication is eliminated (sf, wiki, others) and free-floating inkscape resources are brought into the inkscape community first by getting their management into our project communication lists and second by link to and from our core spaces such as the website.
I'd also try and bring social media together. To know for sure that messages can be sent to twitter, facebook, tumblr, deviantArt all at the same time by project announcement would make me happy knowing as many tangential users as possible are up to date.
But then I might go further by trying to get the in-app notifications ready for 1.0, allowing us to announce to users who wouldn't even think a community could exist for a piece of software.
There are a few questions for how and when we should do some of these things; which would be a great conversation to be a part of in the board.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
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