Hi Thorsten,
On 11/02/2022 03.04, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
Michael Weghorn wrote:
and I remember that the importance of users was emphasized at some in-person
event I attended (probably Akademy) as well.
And I would agree. A user-facing project (opensource or not) that
doesn't care about users in the aggregate is probably doing something
wrong.
I completely agree here and that was also one motivation of writing my
previous email.
This is not directed to you at all, but I sometimes have the impression
of hearing some notion of "Why should we care about the users that don't
contribute anyway?" in some discussions, which I personally don't like.
At least for myself, improving LibreOffice for our users (including
those that don't contribute at all) is a crucial aspect in my personal
motivation to contribute to the project.
Just to mention it, the KDE Code of Conduct contains this:
Our community is made up of several groups of individuals and
organizations which can roughly be divided into two groups:
* Contributors, or those who add value to the project through
improving KDE software and its services
* Users, or those who add value to the project through their
support as consumers of KDE software
I'm not sure KDE would have a fundamentally different view here, but
happy to have that conversation & perhaps hear new, fresh perspectives.
The quote was mainly in response to the question of whether or not
(non-contributing) users should be regarded as part of the community.
In case there was interest in getting some fresh perspectives, I'm
wondering maybe talking about that in some Advisory Board meeting might
make sense, given that e.g. GNOME and KDE are members there.
To clarify what I mean (and why I think KDE's take is not so
different), the KDE manifesto [1] has this:
* End-User Focus to ensure our work is useful to all people
I'm perfectly in-line with that mission statement, as a guiding
principle. But I would not turn down a contribution because it doesn't
meet that standard yet (and instead try mentoring and other ways to
improve it over time). I would, though, dismiss user requests that
don't meet community norms, and not bother mentoring everyone until
they understand.
Thanks for the explanation, that sounds completely reasonable to me (at
least as long as the contribution isn't known to badly break things for
a certain group that worked previously).
For perspective: it is not a scalable task to care for 200 million
users individually. It is though a priority for me (and I hope
achievable), to care for all our contributors, individually. Thus,
mentoring existing, and attracting new contributors will always have a
higher priority to me, than fixing end-user bugs (with project
resources).
Of course, there's nuance. The areas you and others have mentioned,
that would need special attention, are worth tackling.
I totally agree that's generally a reasonable approach and looking at it
on a case-by-case basis as needed makes sense.
Best regards,
Michael
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