As Ubuntu becomes more and more popular, the resources we use to communicate within our community become saturated with the sounds made by new and learning users. This is not a new thing, nor is it undesirable, but unless we find ways to deal with the increasing background noise, we have a real chance of drowning.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we need to hide from users, nor that we should build islands that isolate us from their efforts, but that the systems we use today do not appear to scale well. Spend a few moments in #ubuntu and you'll be surrounded by many users with questions and few with answers. The same is true in the Ubuntu forums, the mailing lists, launchpad, etc. Searching for issues that need resolution will often result in many hits that are people adding "me too" messages, or adding incorrect advice, which then in turn results in more posts. This is getting worse. That is, the noise is increasing. The power of our community is that we provide access to all comers, but that's also our weakness. Not everyone is an expert and not everyone will ever be an expert. Some who think they're experts are not, despite their well meaning attempts at providing pages that show users how to "fix" something by doing something in a "non-Ubuntu way" causing bug reports that don't exist from users who followed the advice. Should we find ways of distinguishing expert advice? Who decides what constitutes an expert? What I've written thus far scratches the surface of what I'm attempting to convey. I've been trying to write this email for six months, and I can only provide two anecdotes to attempt to describe in another way what I'm getting at. * In 1990 I was a participant and contributor to the usenet group Alt.Best.Of.Internet, or ABOI. When AOL joined us online, ABOI was swamped with users posting anything and everything to the group. Despite our best and sustained efforts, the group died in the onslaught of excited new Internet users who overwhelmed us. * Today it was suggested that what I'm getting at is the phenomenon that standing in the middle of a noisy street is a very hard place to concentrate on anything. You really need to find a place where you can close the door and think. While closing the door is simple enough, it defeats the purpose of sharing our efforts in a combined effort with the user community. I'm not attempting to proscribe how to resolve this, what I'm attempting to do with this email is start the discussion about how we might go about planning for success. What are we going to do about the exponential growth in Ubuntu success and exposure? How are we going to continue to flourish and grow while "the masses" arrive with their questions and bug-reports? Perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there. Perhaps others are already thinking about this and I've just come along to add more noise to that discussion - if so, I'm sorry. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. |>>? ..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss