Hi Daniel,
Daniel Carrera wrote:
And of course many votes don't necessarily mean that the issue must be done with any urgency or even done at all. First, we don't have countervotes. What if there are 200 in favor, but 2000 against?
1) People can leave comments saying they disagree.
2) Not a single reason why a user would dislike this feature was ever given.
I did not mean to say that votes are totally useless. Looking at votes surely can provide clues what may be an important issue. But on their own the presence of many votes is not a big argument.
I did not mean to imply that I expect any people to be against reverting the change in the quickstart case. But in the 'return to position of last edit' discussion I do expect that the people who are annoyed or confused by this are less experienced users who are unlikely to actively participate here and probably won't ever vote for or comment in issues.
And of course there needn't be actual countervotes. Given our scarcity of developers any feature done with priority means that another feature is reduced in priority. And lack of votes need not mean that a feature is not important to many people (see below).
Compared to the number of users of OOo or even to the registered project members, 200 is not much.
Honestly, that's a silly argument. You will never get a million users to vote for anything. A usability lab would never expect that. A usability lab is happy to get 20 people, they often have to make do with 5.
Experience shows that after 5-10 people chosen from a certain population it is very likely that observations will repeat. But usability labs chose a target group of users and try to get a random, representatice sample from that group. I don't think active participants in the OOo project are representative of our user base.
Another example of this is the wordcount discussion. This feature is important to a small but verbose group of people, mainly professional writers (including journalists) and apparently students in some subjects or parts of the world. These are people who are likely to be sufficiently computer literate and may also have the time and interest to participate here. But I assume that the majority of our users use the program to write personal or business letters, memos and similar documents and don't care about word count at all. Thus other features with less votes may be more important to more users.
200 votes is a lot. Considering how hard it is for a regular user to reach the point that they can vote in IZ, 200 votes is huge.
If a company encourages its employees to vote for something a certain way you can quickly reach such numbers. A user group (again consisting of lots of computer-literate people) could do the same. In fact in public internet votes such things have happened before.
And last in an OSS project no developer is obliged to develop anything on someone else's schedule or priority list.
That is fair enough, and it's not a wrong thing to say. But the comment that started this thread was the proposition that OOo users had a lot of power to have things changed. I was trying to point out that they don't have a whole lot of power really.
Of course the power of users is limited by this. OTOH the quickstart example shows that developers do listen and want to please the users. But often there is much more to such a change from the technical or organization side than meets the eye of the casual observer.
And couldn't the developers expect more responsiveness as well?
We go to the trouble to write specifications, which are announced on the announce@specs.openoffice.org list.
Okay, we're getting somwehre. There is certainly a communication problem here. I don't think that [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a good way to reach the community. I can't see people signing up to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and reading the specs in the off chance that one of them happens to forshadow a loss of a feature which they feel should "obviously" be there, because it's already there.
But people that are not developers (e.g. from the marketing project) could track that and act as a relay telling a wider audience in less technical terms about important specs and feeding reactions back to the developer.
Completely unmoderated communication between developers and a wider less techinalical audience often don't work well, as can be seen by the way issue commenting is often (ab)used in ways that are perceived as counterproductive by most developers.
Perhaps we should look at how to best communicate between the developers and the users.
There surely are improvements needed. But from experience this is a difficult issue and probably there are no simple solutions.
And then, well after the fact, the complaints start coming in and developers are supposed to turn everything that has matured for month over within a few weeks.
Thank you for giving us the developers' POV. It's important that we hear about it.
I may be exaggerating and I certainly don't pretend for a significant part of the developers. But it is certainly the case that the development process is not well understood by most non-developers.
Okay, so developers and users are not communicating. We need to think of a way that they can. The current channels don't work well (which doesn't surprise me). We need something different.
I don't have a full solution right now. But I expect that whatever solution happens, will involve sending emails to the discuss list, since that's where discussions happen, and where users are located.
I don't think that will by itself help. The more technical and formal mails used in the development process don't really fit a discuss list. And few developers track the discuss list - and even less read here continuously - due to high volume and too much irrelevant (from a developer POV) content.
I have a question: How regular are the emails to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ? How long are they?
See the archives <http://specs.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=announce>. The volume is not very high. the mails are very short and very formal. The real meat is in the specification documents which are linked from the mails. You can browse most of the specifications at <http://specs.openoffice.org>. FYI: We will probably revise the specification handling somewhat for OOo 3.0, because some aspects of the current process haven't worked satisfactorily even for the developers.
Hypothetically speaking, if those were CC'd to discuss, would they totally drown the list? If they wouldn't, then perhaps that's an avenue to explore. What do you think?
As mentioned before I think some active mediators ar needed. Simply pushing the technical content out to non-technical people won't work, just as noisy non-technical discussions won't be well received by the developers.
I don't really complain. We have become used to it. Much of it is simply human nature. But I still find it unfair, if developers are called "unresponsive" on this background.
Well, I'm glad you said something this time. The only way I can try to solve a problem is if I find out about it. I had never heard of [EMAIL PROTECTED], and I suspect that I am in more OOo lists than 90% of the active contributors.
When looking for it I found it to be (too) well hidden. It isn't even mentioned on our main mailing list page. BTW: Do you know of [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is the list to track the step from specification to implementation.
Ciao, Joerg
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