(Resend; if any moderator spots my previous version from a gmail account
please kill it; I try to only use my asf@ address for Apache work - thanks!)
How to say this... whenever dealing with the press (either credentialed
or just prominent blogger/news site), the first thing to do is be polite
and get them the information they need in the format they need. Even if
that seems like it's a pain in the a** from your point of view.
That's very different from interacting with other committed developers
on technical issues, or even working with new community members on an
Apache list. And arguing - or simply lecturing - members of the press
or even prominent technology blogs over various factual details is
almost never a good idea.
Not to say we shouldn't comment on the article, and especially that we
shouldn't do a better job of telling our own story *in the public
arena*, I'm just saying that the attitude of "it's not true (you dolt),
you didn't even read my page here..." is counterproductive to the
community and to our image in my experience.
In particular, we need committed volunteers to both:
- Tell a better public story, presumably through the project blog and
any personal blogs or other sites committers here use. This should be
focused on people who don't already know who we are or what we're doing,
but rather people who say "what the heck happened to OpenOffice.org".
- Take an end user view of every top level service on openoffice.org
now, and start adding the minimal "hey! we're migrating to..." blurbs.
Even being able to update the About text or whatever is critical, even
if we haven't finished all the proper redirects, etc.
Oh, and a broad roadmap for the users of where we're going and roughly
when we might get there is good. Again, one focused on the outside
world, not on people who read ooo-dev@ (or, who may not have even heard
of it).
- Shane
On 9/22/2011 12:03 PM, Rob Weir wrote:
> An interesting new article in Lwn.net by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/458974/
>
> There are a couple factual errors there in describing our project:
>
> 1) The article claims that we have not added any committers since
> the project started
>
> Obviously this is not true. It is easily to verify by looking at
> our recent reports:
>
> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/September2011 (72 committers)
>
> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/August2011 (71 committers)
>
> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/July2011 (56 committers)
>
> You don't need to take off your shoes and count on your toes to see
> that we have more committers than when we started.
>
> 2) The article claims that we don't have an issue tracker set up yet
>
> But if you click on the "bug tracking" link on the home page you
> will end up here:
>
> http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/bug-tracking.html
>
> I'm not sure there is anything we can do to make this more obvious.
>
> Either of these errors would have been easily avoided if "Zonker"
> asked a question on this list or attempted to contact Apache. He
> seems to have followed the list traffic enough to pick out a few
> negative points, but then misses the discussion on the list of our
> monthly reports, or that fact Bugzilla has been migrated.
>
> Of course, journalists of all stripes are busy people, with
> deadlines and not a lot of time to fact check. So anything we can do
> to make progress on the project more obvious to the casual visitor
> might be a good thing. For example, when we have something as
> significant as the successful Bugzilla migration, maybe that should
> get a blog post? Maybe we can try to establish a regular cadence of
> posts, say every two weeks? If we make people dig through the mail
> archives for news, then we make it difficult for them and they will
> make dumb mistakes. They are not experts in our project. We are. So
> anything we can do to give them per-digested, factual of course, but
> more easily consumable information is of great help to the working
> journalist.
>
> -Rob
