Benoit, This is a notice that I am going to assume lazy consensus on the proposal to create a marketing@ list. If you have a formal objection to raise, please do so now, and I will move this to a vote.
We have the following lists: erlang@ - Created specifically to create "safe space" for people to get up to speed on Erlang l10n@ - Created specifically to create a "focused space" for people to do translations replication@ - Created specifically to create a "focused space" for people discussing replication, etc You say this: "Also due to the low volumes of mails on @dev this shouldn't be a problem." But this is not the common perception. In fact, there is a lot of traffic to our dev@ mailing list. Way too much for most non-devs to cope with. I even know current devs who find the traffic from CouchDB hard to deal with. On top of that, our dev@ list can be a bit of a hostile and scary place. I have had direct feedback on this point. So I am worried that there are people who are not participating because they don't want to be on dev@. So my goal here is to create a "safe/focused" place where people who are interested in the "softer" side of marketing and project/community growth to hang out and discuss things without: a) Having to feel put off by devs or dev discussion b) Having to feel like they are wasting people's time/bandwidth/attention "Having a marketing list is also quite uncommon in an opensource projects." I don't care. We find what works for us, not what works for other people. Though, as you mention it, the idea for a marketing@ list comes from Apache CloudStack. They have one, and it is working out just fine for them. They get lots of non-dev participation, which is exactly the sort of thing I am hoping for. You don't have to be able to code to contribute to CouchDB. "When a project starts to have more than 2 lists it starts to be really annoying to track and quite expensive." Expensive in what sense? We already have a number of lists. I think this expansionism is a good thing. If the lists don't work, it's not a problem. We close the list, and we move the discussion back to dev. This is a reversible experiment. "I'd be in favour of keeping the number of lists small until it becomes clear that some topic needs to spin off into its own list." We didn't do this for erlang@, or l10n@, or replication@. In each case, we identified that there might be some discussion which is *not happening yet because the dev@ list is not a good place for it*. "While the volume of marketing emails is low, it's not hard for devs who aren't that interested in marketing to ignore them, just as those who aren't interested in specific dev topics can ignore those." I believe that just like people talking about how to learn Erlang, and people talking about translation, and people talking about third-party apps, the reason the volume is so low is because there is/was no place to talk about it. Our dev list is noisy, can be unfriendly, and is mostly focused on dbcore dev. (Unsurprisingly.) That's fine. But there are other areas to contribute. And I outright reject the idea that you need to know anything about dbcore or Erlang or even how to programme to be able to contribute to CouchDB. I don't want to dwell on this. I appreciate the discussion, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds. Having acknowledged the concerns raised, I will keep a close eye on the marketing@ list and assume responsibility for it. I can provide oversight, and am happy to report on progress in three months, six months, and so on. If this isn't good enough, please raise a formal objection to the proposal. I will then attempt to call a majority consensus vote so that we can get this over and done with. On 3 February 2014 10:46, Benoit Chesneau <bchesn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Andy Wenk <a...@nms.de> wrote: >> >> On 3 February 2014 10:14, Benoit Chesneau <bchesn...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Andy Wenk <a...@nms.de> wrote: >>>> >>>> On 3 February 2014 08:42, Benoit Chesneau <bchesn...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Noah Slater <nsla...@apache.org> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> Ashley, >>>>>> >>>>>> Wrt marketing plans: yes, but half way between my head, and my private >>>>>> notes. Unfortunately, my private notes also contain things from >>>>>> private conversations with people. Major mistake on my part. Apologies >>>>>> to the community. >>>>>> >>>>>> I've just sent an email giving a few people notice that I plan to >>>>>> start moving things over to the wiki. Hopefully over the next week or >>>>>> so I can get all of our existing marketing ideas in a communal space >>>>>> so we can start to discuss it. >>>>>> >>>>>> As for the marketing@ list: great. So what we'll do now is wait >>>>>> another day or two. If nobody objects, we can make the list. (This is >>>>>> how we make most of our decisions on the project. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> I am not sure it's a good idea to have a marketing list. Marketing >>>>> should be linked to dev and vice-versa . It's important that marketing >>>>> follows dev discussion and that dev follows and interact with the >>>>> marketing. >>>>> Having 2 mailing-lists will create a disconnection. Which is good path to >>>>> the failure in tech. Also due to the low volumes of mails on @dev this >>>>> shouldn't be a problem. >>>>> >>>>> - benoit >>>> >>>> >>>> hm ... I understand exactly what you mean and I agree, if we would speak >>>> of a company with different big departments here. But in our project I >>>> think >>>> it is totally ok that we have two different lists and the people who are >>>> strongly interested in both parts should subscribe both lists. The >>>> advantage >>>> imho is to not flood the dev@ list with unrelated stuff ... >>> >>> >>> >>> Why do you think it would be different because we are an opensource >>> project? If marketing people don't want to follow all devs discussion then >>> there is some perspective problem imo. The same for devs that ignore the >>> users perspectives. Marketing should be elaborated with all the devs, not in >>> a side corner. At least this what we learn in management schools. And this >>> is really true for a **neutral** opensource project which has no business >>> perspective (and shouldn't have). >>> >>> - benoit >> >> >> I did not mean to see it differently because we are an OpenSource project >> but because of the size of the project. I don't think that we will have the >> situation, that the marketing activities are going into a different >> direction because of having two lists. I still believe that everything is >> very transparent. Having more lists does not lead to in-transparencies but >> will lead in more focused discussions. The connection between marketing and >> development targets is created by the interest people have - and they should >> be interested in both and should therefor subscribe both lists ... if they >> don't they are not interested in marketing activities (what is ok for me). >> But I agree that if no dev will subscribe the marketing list, we will have >> the marketing activities in a side corner ... >> >> >> > > this is the " if they don't they are not interested in marketing activities" > which is problematic. By marketing in a community project, I often mean > every actions taken to grow the community. I can't imagine a dev not > interested by it. Having a marketing list is also quite uncommon in an > opensource projects. But to be more concrete I often take the zeromq project > as a template to build a successful community, When you see the > mailing-lists attached to the project [1] you only have 2. If you take a > recent success in communication, the docker project, this is the same [2]. > > Imo this is part of its success. While it's totally fine to multiply the > annonces channels, I do think that a community and its members should act > together when it's about core community discussions. Part of these core > discussions are: > > - dev discussions : features/roadmap/status > - community discussions > - users discussions about some features > > > Also lot of peopple are already subscribed to more than XXX list, to follow > N projetcs daily (customer purpose, survey...). When a project starts to > have more than 2 lists it starts to be really annoying to track and quite > expensive. > > - benoit > > > [1] http://zeromq.org/docs:mailing-lists > [2] http://www.docker.io/community/ -- Noah Slater https://twitter.com/nslater
