Alon Altman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Dotan wrote:
Nadav Har'El wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about "Re: An out
of the box solution?":
As I see that the audiance is people which are involved and care
about FOSS and
which the use mailing list method drives them away.
Dotan, what you're saying doesn't make much sense. First, Hamakor's
mailing
list is just one tool it uses to keep members connected.
I'm talking of breaking the limited members circle and get more
people to be involved in the discussion which are the essence of
Hamakor (as its pointed time and again that the activities are driven
by the people and not by the amuta) in hope they will also take part
in the activities when they get the larger picture.
There was an effort to create a newsletter and publish it on the site.
Orna was (is?) in charge of writing it, but due to lack of time, no
newsletter was published for a long time. In any case, if there is anyone
willing to be a contact person with forums and update them on Hamakor
actions, we will be very glad.
The discussions list is open to subscriptions and anyone can join.
Furthermore, archives are available online.
There are also
snail-mail letters, there are physical assemblies, conferences (like
August
Penguin), not to mention members who meet in various occasions, and
so on.
That remains in the limited members circle.
August penguin was published on any means that was available to us,
including all fourms.
Hamakor members also frequent Web-forums and other venues for
discussions,
which were not necessarily created as an official Hamakor medium (as
you
know, Rashut Hadoar also wasn't created by Hamakor, but we use it
for our
purposes ;-)).
They (hamakor members) are there as individuals and most forums
readers are kept out of the circle as they are not updated/informed
by all the means you detailed above and untill recently they didn't
have any option to follow Hamakor discussions and ever since theres
an option they were not informed about it (partly because I wasn't
asked to inform them)
Anyone could have joined the mailing lists. Hamakor board members
try to
post important issues on websites such as Whatsup and linmagazine,
however
we cannot do that with any single update.
You cannot just discout it as being "inconvenient". If this Ram
Matityahu
refuses to use email and email lists, he loses out on much more than
Hamakor
discussions: He will also be unable to contribute to most Free Software
projects! Do you think that if he tells Linus Torvalds to call him
on the
phone or join him on some "forum" of his choice - because he
couldn't be
bothered to subscribe to the linux-kernel- mailing list - this will
ever
happen? Linus would just laugh at his face.
The similarity is odd ;)
Linus is not activly looking for contributors and when he does I'm
sure he knows what to do (including personal corespodance, phones and
more).
Hamakor talks as if it looks for contributors but does nothing to
reach them and alternativly waits to be contacted by the means it
dictate.
Our calls for volunteers are routienly posted on sites such as Whatsup.
Posting every notice on three sites in addition to our mailing lists
required a lot of duplicated effort, that there is no volunteer
willing to
do, including you.
Alternatively, if Ram cares but really hates reading mail, he could
ask you
(who does read the mail) if there was anything important. This is
similar
to busy executives who don't have time to read journals and so on,
so they
ask others to summarize things for them. They don't just say "this
journal
takes too long to read, so I'll just ignore it".
Ram (as an example for the audiance currently left aside) can hold
his will to contribute but he offers it. Holding him back, by any
mean, and asking him to use mail is like asking a right handed to
write with his left one
So you say Ram (and others) have a disability preventing them from
using
anything that passed through SMTP. I really cannot grasp the difference
between logging into webmail and reading and posting message and logging
into a forum and reading and posting messages. If Ram will not use
webmail,
he will not use a forum he doesn't frequent regularly.
As a matter of fact he and others act in this in ungraspable mode and we
are missing them.
(you may also add in this particular case Shlomi's mail which detail
that
"Alon eventually told me to let him write the site..." and when you
read,
emphesise the "eventualy".
I told Ram to write the site as soon as he volunteered to do so. He did
not.
Shlomi described it differently and I guess Ram got pretty confused of
it all.
Again, forums are not bad, and many of them already use them (e.g.,
Whatsup).
All of Hamakor's announcements end up on this forums. So what's
wrong with
this? Would you want Hamakor to host its own forum on its own
server? Why,
what's wrong with using an existing forum server?
Hamakor does extensive use of mailing lists. This mailing lists are
not accessible by most forums readers. There is a solution which can
sync forums and mailing list. At least one Israeli site implemented
it and it looks very good (at least as an opening stage if you want
to adopt a sceptic view).
Technically theres a solution and the only thing to stop it is a
decission.
Not exactly. Uri Sharf can decide whether or not to put a syncronized
forum for the discussions list. Other people (such as the board memebers)
will have to invest a significant effort to build and deploy such a
system,
and you'll critisize us that we didn't publish it enough. The board
welcomes
a syncronized forum, but for some reason, Uri is not willing to host
it any
more.
That's good news. Unfortuntly I believe I'm currently not in a position
to talk Uri to do so but I might check how it can be done independent of
Linmagazine but you may expect my answers only after W2L (that's 3 weeks
in the JLC).
Alon
