On 6/2/07, Jim Henderson <hendersj@...155...> wrote:
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.
Your missing my point entirely. A blog is the right kind of tool, but has the big downside that people have to find it. And a planet isnt the answer either, because thats then limited to the people who've been added to the aggregation list. A forum gives you one central point, that you can find all the different relevant discussions, has a low barrier for entry, and encourages discussion. You say you know people who use this as a tool, but thats just the point, you have to know their there, or they need to be linked from somewhere (ie someone else has to have found them first)
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.
You can never cater for everyone, its about looking at a target audience and aiming to cater to them as best you can. Theres gonna be edge cases for everything.
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.
Looking at the POVray groups yesterday they werent actualluy all that multimedia intensive by the standards of a lot of the places i hang out. (admittedly it was a pretty brief skim, so I could have been unlucky with my sampling.)
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.
I said before and I'll say again, I'm not talking about fragmenting the discussion this list sees, because we see very little creative commentry on here. I'm talking about trying to stimulate some new discussion. Jack of all trades, master of none is the phrase that springs to mind. why do lots of things badly, or cater to lots of people needs badly, when you can do a good job for a focused area? I'd guess our user numbers are well into 6 figures judging by the download figures for 0.45.1 yet we have little to no creative community going on here, clearly a list is not working as an interface for that kind of discussion/community building. You say "a good community does not *exclude* people because of their choice of access to the community" I'd say we're probably excluding a lot of people by the interface we provide currently.
Does that clarify what I'm saying?
Jim
I understand where your coming from, I just dont agree :)
Cheers
Sim