Jim Henderson wrote:
Egads, ANOTHER Inkscape forum? Don't we have enough already?
Creating yet another discussion forum creates yet another community division, another place for people to get answers to their questions, another place for people to have to go to see if anyone can answer their question....It's not good for the community!
I'm sorry but I disagree. I think open source is a lot about division. Building a community doesn't mean building a monolithic-one-forum-only community. The more the projects, the better. And it doesn't matter if it divides the community as only the "strongest will survive". New projects increase an open source project activity and improve the creativity of its contributors. If a new forum is created and its "value added" is not strong enough, then it will just vanish into fin air. Its disappearance doesn't matter, the important thing is what it brought to the community : new ideas, new users... As mentionned in an other message it's also possible to bind communities : RSS feeds, NTTP mapping...
An other example, more developer oriented, is Inkscape itself. The project itself is "yet another open source project". It's actually a fork of Sodipodi. And many projects are just forks of others : Post-Nuke, eMule... Not forking a project or not providing side-projects and forums would just mean the death of an open source project. There are many reasons to fork a project : add new values, provide new features, build new communities, reinvent the wheel and improve it... So many things to provide, share, create... the possibilities are just endless.
To sum things up I get the idea behind your reply because it's important to have a solid community, an official forum, so users quickly get help. But not encouring other users to contribute and create their own forums would mean the death of Inkscape. It would be just an other dead Inkscape, it could even be compared to all these "great" proprietary projects where users are invited to serve and use but not to contribute. Don't get me wrong, in fact I believe projects like Adobe Illustrator are even more "opened" than Inkscape. History I suppose, but Adobe understood that it's all about the community, the more it grows, the better. Everything else is pure garbage.
Sorry if I sound frustrated, but this seems to come up on various lists I subscribe to about every 3 months - someone has the novel idea of creating a "forum" using vBulletin or BBchat or WibbleChatGadget or some other "hot" new discussion area, without considering that they're fragmenting the community rather than uniting it. It gets very tiresome to go "OK, now I have a question about Inkscape, do I go to the Inkscape- Users list, InkscapeWorld, InkscapeForums, InkscapeLovers, InkscapeProfessionalsForum, InkscapeRandomIdeasGroups, InkscapeYadaForum, InkscapeNewUsersForums, InkscapeUsersWithFuzzyCats, InkscapeThisForum, InkscapeThatForum, or InkscapeUniverse to get an answer because the expertise is so dispersed amongst all these places.
(Note that many of the above listed "groups" don't (yet) exist - it's exaggeration to make a point)
You forgot phpBB :). Seriously I'm not sure "not fragmenting" the community is a good thing. As a French user I can tell I'm very pleased by the French forum we have. This group, our small French community... So I see InkscapeFrench, InkscapeEspa�a, InkscapeMoshiMoshi, InkscapeFrenchInParis, InkscapeFrenchInLyon, InkscapeGalaxy... And if users from Paris and Lyon don't get any answers, well the communities will just "close" and the users will "migrate" to the French one... Messages will be archived and users will be able to search them from communities if needed...
I can compare the problem with our recent Presidential election where some people believe in diversity (division, fragmentation...) when others dream of a united country where people would all looked the same (Orwell), one religion, one language (French invasion ahah !) and "one ring to rule them all" :P. I believe in open-open-open source & culture, of course.
I want to fork Inkscape, port it to my good old Atari 1040 STE, rewrite its code in pure 68000, translate it for French users-ONLY and build a MinitelT powered community that would costs ?1 each time a user dial 3615 to get help. Who's in ? :D