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