On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 10:36:11 +0200, Jean-Marc Molina wrote:
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...
That's what I'd be in favor of (hopefully obviously. ;-) )
There's difference between specializing a forum/list/newsgroup and duplicating an existing one as well. For example, on one set of forums that I follow rather closely, there are something around 100 different products and each has different components - I subscribe to about 100 different newsgroups there. That kind of specialization is *good* - but it's also coherent - I don't have to visit 100 different websites to see the different groups, I go to one place. That's the type of centralization that is useful, IMHO.
So, for example, this list is useful for a certain thing; inkscape- developers is useful for those working on development issues. An art/how- to/Inkscape+Blender group would be a specialized group that would cover topics perhaps not covered here.
But in order for that type of group to be successful, it needs to be (a) accessible, (b) easy for people to use, and (c) easy to find.
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.
I disagree quite strongly with this sentiment - not creating other forums isn't the "death of Inkscape" - if it's not thought out, fragmenting the community in disjoined forums that duplicate efforts could, though. Concentration of expertise is very good for the health of a community - just like centralizing the code in a CVS or SVN repository is good for the project. Sure, you can fork the project if you want. But you just need to look at the Compiz and Beryl projects to see that ultimately taking the changes from one and bringing them into the other is inefficient - a better community synergy was recognized when the two projects merged because the changes weren't divided.
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.
Yes, the more the community grows, the better, but growth of the community needs to be done in an organised fashion. If it's because a group here or there formed with no connection back to a point of commonality, it's the growth of a customer base, and not a community. A community that's strong interacts with other parts of the community rather than building islands of expertise that don't know about each other. Even various LUGs around the world are interconnected in a way that makes them a very cohesive community.
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, InkscapeEspaña, 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...
Like I said (and maybe should have clarified) - a monolithic catch-all discussion group/list/forum is bad, I agree with that. It's that there needs to be some thought put into the process of building the community, rather than anyone with a 'net connection, a server, and a piece of software deciding to create a forum *because they can*. Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*, and IMHO certainly not without planning on how to fit things into the larger picture so that there is cohesion.
The danger with duplicating existing efforts is that some expertise stays in one place, some goes to another. Now if I have a question about how to use the Perspective effects filter, I ask here, I don't get an answer, now I ask the question in InkscapeGalaxy because there's someone there who might know the answer; I don't get an answer there, so now I go to InkscapeUniverse and ask again - it's very inefficient (to the point of user-hostile) for the person asking the question. Experts generally aren't going to visit multiple different websites to share their wisdom because it's inefficient for them.
Eric Raymond, in his article on asking effective questions, states:
'Be sensitive in choosing where you ask your question. You are likely to be ignored, or written off as a loser, if you:
* post your question to a forum where it's off topic * post a very elementary question to a forum where advanced technical questions are expected, or vice-versa * cross-post to too many different newsgroups * post a personal e-mail to somebody who is neither an acquaintance of yours nor personally responsible for solving your problem
Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.
*The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum.*'
(Taken from http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ; Emphasis added)
I think we can all agree that ESR has something of a vested interest in he OSS movement. ;-)
Finding the right forum to ask the question in is difficult to impossible to do if there's too much duplication within the community. In order to be effective, the community *needs* to be organized in is approach to communications.
I may have said this before, so excuse me if I have - I've been doing online forums professionally for nearly 20 years now; I was a SysOp on Compuserve forums (and that wasn't my first experience) and have followed the evolution of forums held on CompuServe into newsgroups on the web. I've worked with proprietary web-based forum software that integrates with an NNTP backend as well as OSS web "forum" software. I've helped design successful online communities for groups ranging from a few hundred users (which is one I manage professionally right now) to millions of users. I've also observed online communities longer than that, having participated (as many have) in online BBS' back when things like Citadel were popular. I don't approach the topic of online communities from a position of ignorance, but have a pretty large amount of experience in managing online communities.
I've seen some succeed and some fail, and I think we all have similar goals - we want the community to be successful (who doesn't? Let's identify that now <G>). I think we should have some consensus about strategy to move forward so there is cohesion in the community and it's easy for the new user to come in and figure out where to ask their question. If we don't make it easy for the new user, while making it flexible enough for the experienced users, then the community won't grow because new users will get frustrated and go find something else to do.
Can we agree to this?
Jim