On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 09:40 -0500, Ted Gould wrote: 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

Welcoming, yes, certainly. Any motivated people can easily find its place in the project. We now have regular contributor in all major aspects of the project (dev, translations, documentation, bug triage...). But sometimes I feel (from a bug triager's point of view) we're not that encouraging. Ok, we accept contributors, but we don't always motivate them as needed. When someone attach a patch to a report, it can take very long before a tester or a dev take a look and advice (we currently have 144 open reports with patch attached). I would find it very disappointing to see my patch stay untested for years, and probably wouldn't contribute again (random report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/176541, patch posted more than 6 years ago, still not tested). In a perfect world, all reporters should receive an answer as quickly as possible so that we don't give the impression that we don't care. Not easy, but could be improved. There are very good points: 1. The new website is a real improvement, with the help of lots of dev and non-dev contributors. The possibility to live edit and translate the site was a key point that led to that positive result. If you give the appropriate tools to users, they can become contributors. 2. I rarely visit the Inkscape-forum, but it seems very active. The LP Answer section is very active too. In 2008, unanswered questions were frequent. It's no longer the case. Mixed feelings: 3. Bug triaging also improved since 2008. I never used the SF bug tracker, but LP is very convenient for that kind of task. So again, the tool probably helped. But what helped the most, IMHO, is the fact that new (and very high quality) contributors joined the team in 2009. Unfortunately, regular triagers are quite rare, and some reports don't get the attention they would need. Bug triaging is not easy. You have to know the application (or parts of it) as an advanced user, and have a good idea on how the features are implemented. And the job is somewhat ungrateful, particularly when you're triaging alone. Thus it's not something that's going to attract users, but it's not a lost cause... 4. Translators were very active up to 0.47, and I feel it got worse until very recently (we just added 18 new Indian languages two weeks ago). Say "thank you" to all our contributors ;) Invite users to report bugs (or comment existing ones) or new ideas in our tracker. Have developers help bug triagers test patches and triage bugs (e.g. after committing a patch, it could be useful to test all related reports in case some of them are incidentally fixed). Launch dedicated campaigns when we have special needs (translation campaign for forgotten languages?) Regards.