On Wednesday 11 of March 2009 19:06:33 Thilo Bangert wrote: > my complaint isn't about people using IRC. i object to the way that much > of our knowledge, discussion and decision making process appear to have > been moved into the temporal black hole that is IRC.
> realtime communication is an valuable tool, but IRC has drawbacks as well. > this is alienating a lot of people who dont happen to be on IRC at the > right moment/timezone or who dont have the time to be always on. > it looks like many projects within Gentoo have resorted to a communication > process which uses IRC exclusivly. this is unfortunate... Hard to disagree with this. I observed it myself - when I started maintaining ebuilds in overlay, consequently I started to use IRC to be in touch with the rest of KDE Gentoo team. Unfortunately it has some drawbacks like less my availability on forums (and I used it much more often) - to the point that I forgot to update whole 4.2 release announcement in Desktop Environment (in that sticky "Read before posting" thread). IRC is black hole definitely and from developers point of view everything looks just, as they actively communicating with each other - unfortunately being somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. This may increase that feeling from typical user point of view - that developers are somewhere there cooking something, and there's no way to get to them (unless they find about IRC). This is the problem as most users used to sweep forums first as it's "medium" available for them out of the box - just google for some problem and there you are. Now, important. While I don't propose for developers to visit forums - it may be another *solution*. Developers - they (we/you) already chosen IRC as best/fastest/favourite medium for communication apart from mailing list that is - it could stay that way. Why not integrate more users by creating *Support* *staff* role? They could be recruited as typical staff (like moderators) - using staff quiz. Their "job" would be to: - wander on forums answering user questions - poke developers on IRC with some issues (maybe proposed patches) - filling bugzilla bugs (they'd need some *basic* bugzilla knowledge - just to be able to find whether are such issues already and to properly, descriptively create new bug) - not full bugwrangling with assigning and such - provide living evidence that "Gentoo is not dying" whatever and has support They could be given @gentoo.org aliases to make them motivated. It would be easier for those alike to become developers later. There's thread related to user contribution on forums - as reference: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-702248.html (this should rather be discussed on gentoo-project I guess, but nm) -- regards MM
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