On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:25:58 +0100, john cliff wrote:
Thats all well and good, but if the 'right tool' isnt being looked at then it doesnt matter if its the right tool. You can have as many wikis as you want, but if jo blogs the user doesnt know to look there, all your going to end up with is a bunch of people asking in the mail list/ forum.
That's why a central repository of links to various community resources is needed - a centralized pointer, if you will. This is how I direct my communities to forums/newsgroups, wikis, and other resources (downloads).
And I wouldnt want absolutely anyone editing the post about my wip, dont mind them commenting, but thats a different thing.
Sure, so use a blog for that. That's what this "sticky forum post" is really being used as, so rather than manipulate a piece of software (threaded discussions) to do something it wasn't particularly designed to do (collaborative creation), using the right tool for the job is the right thing to do, IMHO. Point people at it from the centralized resource locater (a sort of "service location" resource, if you will) so they can find it.
That depends on how your collaborating. If you want an everyone mucks in with no overall control approach, you want a wiki. if you simply want feedback on what is essentialy one persons creation, that their remaining in control of, I'd go with a forum still.
Again, I'd consider a blog the right tool for that. I know people who write fiction who use this as a tool, and it's quite successful for that purpose.
I'm confused, thats half the point I was trying to make that you argued against that you've just come back and agreed with. Mailing lists arent suited to multimedia intensive discussions where not everyone wants to see everything. A forum doesnt stop it being inline, but at the same time doesnt overburden everyone with the need to download everything.
And for those who work disconnected (as I do), or who participate in many different areas, let them figure out how to do this in the time they have? Again, I have almost 200 newsgroups I read (this mailing list is one of the ones I read via gmane, a list server to NNTP gateway), and if I had to go to each resource separately or process all this information online (instead of, say, on an airplane, which I have done in the past as I used to travel a lot), I'd never be able to participate in well over half of them.
Mailing lists can work for "multimedia intensive discussions" - just look at the POVRay groups to see an example. The point is, I can avoid downloading large attachments if people link to, say, a Flickr account rather than include the content in the messages. Bandwidth-friendly, able to read the content offline, and include multimedia. It works very effectively for that.
There's nothing to prevent, say, someone creating a web-based forum that pulls the remote images inline for those who like that type of presentation. A good community, IMHO, does not *exclude* people because of their choice of access to the community. It's not always easy to accommodate everyone (and every small minority shouldn't be a primary consideration, also), but given the traffic this list/group sees, I don't see how it benefits the Inkscape community at large to fragment through a *duplication* of existing discussion areas just because someone doesn't like the way it's presented. It's more efficient and better for the community to talk about *integration* rather than spinning off, which is what it seemed some were advocating.
Does that clarify what I'm saying?
Jim