houghi wrote:

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 07:00:15PM -0500, Rajko M wrote:

...

So, community will grow if content would be more "user friendly", but not in twisted way that mean "most clueless user friendly". SUSE users are folk that is trying to escape this kind of "friendliness".

And hee we are again inderectly talking about a re-build of at least the frontpage. Hope some people have some time when 10.1 is out to finaly do something and not just talk about it. :-/

houghi

Yes houghi. Rebuild is not the topic, because we actually don't have much. The word is "build". Not enough people are active, and it will not be better after 10.1 is out. Then it comes 10.2, ... , 10.X . So we are on our own to solve how to attract more people to contribute, how to advertise existence of openSUSE, make people feel that their contributions are worth for opensuse.org. -- Regards, Rajko.

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 01:13:53PM +0200, jdd wrote:

And we try to attract Windows users, so we need doc to explain how to make things.

I am not trying to attract Windows Users. I am not in competition with Windows, nor am I interested in what the largest distribution is. This des not mean we do not need docs and a better wiki-layout. It means I will not focus on Windows. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 04:25:06PM +0200, jdd wrote:

People already using Linux don't need really more help than what we already give (fine tuning they distro)

Yes they do. They most likely have not ever used YaST. I have seen people who used Mandriva for a longer time ask how to install programs under SUSE. What repositories where and so on.

the people that needs to now how to organise they desktop are mostly new computer users (are they some?) or windows users. period.

I could use lessons in that. :-)

We need to focus on application sharing.

That is a generic Linux issue and not solely a SUSE issue. So yes, more documentation and information. Definatly. I am absolutely not against that. It must be because it is wanted, not because somebody comes from Windows or never has used a PC before. I have seem people lost, because they changed from KDE to Gnome. I have been lost trying to figure out things in KDE and yet I am not unfamiliar with SUSE. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 10:25:22PM -0500, Rajko M wrote:

Rebuild is not the topic, because we actually don't have much.

The word is "build".

Not enough people are active, and it will not be better after 10.1 is out. Then it comes 10.2, ... , 10.X .

So we are on our own to solve how to attract more people to contribute, how to advertise existence of openSUSE, make people feel that their contributions are worth for opensuse.org.

Doing actual changes with what we have should already be a good beginning. One thing about the frontpage is that there should be something to attract repeat visitors. e.g. Project Milestones last date is Apr 13th. Nothing happening after that? No more upcomming events. No news. As long as information is hidden, it will not attract people to get there and/or to do changes. "Not enough people are active". Do you mean on this list? Many people do not like lists. Also this list is more about technical issues then anything else. To realy know if more people are helping out, it would be nice to see some pre- and post-openSUSE bugzilla numbers. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:52:35AM +0200, Christian Boltz wrote:

Quoting AJ's mail in opensuse-announce ("schedule update") from thursday:

Thank you all for your support for SUSE Linux 10.1, with this version we received for the first time more feedback from the community than from engineers inside Novell

I'd say this is quite impressing ;-)

It is. Knowing how it is devided might give some insight. If it was 49.9 and 50.1 all the time and now the other way around, then it is just a nice milestone. If it is 80-20, and now the other way around, then that is amazing. :-)

AJ: Can you please add some more statistics? - what percentage of bug reports came from the community for 10.0? - what percentage of bug reports for 10.1 came from the "old" [1] beta testers? (I don't want to split the community into "old" and "new" - I'm just interested in the numbers ;-)

Throw in the numbers for previous versions in as well, so you can see wether the beta's realy made a difference, or that it was a trent waiting to happen (and even slowed things down) And remeber kids, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:51:33PM +0200, Christoph Thiel wrote:

...

- what percentage of bug reports came from the community for 10.0?

IIRC we had some 1/3 communtiy to 2/3 Novell / SUSE repored bugs for 10.0. This has changed for 10.1, where we approximately have the same numbers in reverse.

WOW. Do you have some absolute numbers as well? I asume we are talking about more then 3 bugs here. ;-) houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

One of the things needed to attract the community is to make SUSE community wikis better - perhaps we need to add the ability to go *level up* & improve browsing through wiki. Current openSUSE Wiki navigation is bad which makes it hard to find docs written by community.

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 01:41:50PM +0200, jdd wrote:

Alexey Eremenko wrote:

...

One of the things needed to attract the community is to make SUSE community wikis better - perhaps we need to add the ability to go *level up* & improve browsing through wiki.

Current openSUSE Wiki navigation is bad which makes it hard to find docs written by community.

there are several problems.

* better index pages * better search engine * better use of categories... * better use of sub pages/sub categories...

but all this is time consuming, so please, if you can, even a casual help is good :-)

I would also add: * better linking to other related pages * more editing on pages that are not your own. An extremely good start is http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Specialpages where you can see e.g. if 'Oldest Pages' need changes. What pages do not have a catagory. What pages are wanted and other things.

From http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Statistics : There are 21,894 registered users, of which 22 (or 0.10%) are administrators (see Project:Administrators).

I would say almost 22.000 is not a bad number. The question is on how to make them active. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 10:52:20AM +1000, Peter Flodin wrote:

On 4/20/06, jdd wrote:

...

I think I already drop some words about it, but it's probably worth making from time to time

I found the active community very short in number.

We should try to find ways to attract users and make some of them becomming more involved.

How about a web forum?

Peter 'Pflodo' Flodin, runs away....

ROTFLOL. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

jdd wrote:

Peter Flodin wrote:

...

On 4/20/06, jdd wrote:

...

I think I already drop some words about it, but it's probably worth making from time to time

I found the active community very short in number.

We should try to find ways to attract users and make some of them becomming more involved. How about a web forum?

Peter 'Pflodo' Flodin, runs away....

Let me check how far flies tomato :-)

simply we need to see the discussed projects to be achieved.

even if few people discussed them. I don't like forums, but forum creation was clearly asked by a majority, so go ahead.

DO a frontpage redesign, why not with an info banner "one month page redesign contest" :-)

go on...

jdd

The joke about forum is that we have 8 newsgroups with opensuse.org in the name, but not many present here are present there to help out with the problems. BTW http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate#Usenet lists a half of gmane, but not own support-forums.novell.com. I found them under http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate#Web-Forums. Well, it's a bitty hidden, but ... Why forum if news groups are not used? From my prospective they both have the same essence considering problem solution, graphic gimmicks possible in web forum are just annoyance making reading harder. Majority asking for forum should try to see support-forums.novell.com. That would be one of the places where www.opensuse.org can be advertised with links to solutions offered on opensuse.org as well as solutions from newsgroup used to enrich opensuse wiki. It is not forbidden to take article from one side to the other, or to use opensuse.org to illustrate the solution for problem found in newsgroups. Apropos search engines, I'm wondering why are newsgroups opensuse.org excluded from Google groups. One can't be popular and isolated at the same time. -- Regards, Rajko.

Rajko M wrote:

Majority asking for forum... don't start the thread again. I don't like forum. I'm on the french Alionet forum because I want to make opensuse known, but I think the discussion ended in favor of forum and I accept that.

but this was not done. I remember having waited 6 month the french wiki. Now We, french, are 6 month late :-( and when the wiki come I was nearly leaving... and could have leave. Voluntieers are always busy people. they can be busy with us if we give them what they need, or for completely different things if not. I remember old times at university. We where using gestetner to copy courses. We had to put the sheets of papers on a table and turn around taking a sheet at a time, to make the book. anytime a student come to see us we said go help, turn with us :-) and we had hundreds of companions. Then with buy a machine to make the collection. one year off we have less than ten people working. we didn't retain the volunteers. So we need to identify * things to make the people come at least once * small jobs, the easier the better that anybody can do. right now I can see some of these jobs: * bug hunting. bugzilla is a little intimidating. the main problem is that it's entirely in english. should it be possible to have the bugzilla screens translated? I know one must understand a little english to help, but I had myself quite difficulties to go there the first time. may be we should open a "bug report wiki page", at least on non_english wikis? * wiki typo editing: here the login process is a brake. May be a forum could be a better entry point for beginners * categorisation : we need really to better document this .... jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos

Alexey Eremenko wrote:

Of course this is only possible, if there are enough volunteers willing to resubmit english-newbie and nonenglish bugs to professional bugzilla language.

some kind of bugs, easily reproductible can be sent that way, but few. However this can be a significant part of the localized bugs: bugs due only on localized versions, mostly typos or translation bugs. A forum is probably more appropriate here, or a wiki page "most annoying bugs" seen by users (the bugs that upsets the users are not necessarily the ones that the programmer see) mainly it needs an interface between the new users and bugzilla. One year ago I didn't manage to use bugzilla (on openoffice) and some people on the relevant list did this for me. more elsewhere jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos

If a reporter does not communicate well enough in English to exchange information with the support-person on the other side, I don't think having the bugzilla interface in the local language will help.

I agree, but it still can be done through non-english (say french) wiki - while (the french) wiki leader fills the bugs in the english bugzilla.

Localised versions of bugzilla are useless - because most community & Novell developers speak english, and perhaps one additional language. But other developers won't be able to work on the same bug, unless it's described in English. The Peer review process described on "The Cathedral & The Bazaar" only works if there is one common language. My primary-language is *not* English, but I perfectly understand the need for a common language -both- for development and for everyday life. And if that common language happens to be English - then alright. Bugs written in non-english won't be resolved until somebody translates them. Maybe since SUSE was German - it would be possible to make German bugzilla (as there are plenty of SUSE German developers)- but this trick will not work for other languages. For other languages - having a community leader (wiki or forum) as a translator is the only way to go.

Carl Hartung schrieb:

Besides, Google has very effective language translation tools. After you select your 'from' and 'to' languages, you enter the page to be translated. You can even navigate in the translated pages. Pretty cool stuff if you haven't tried it before.

Maybe. In my experience, any machine translation will corrupt the original meaning so much that nobody will be able to understand it. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/

Carl Hartung schrieb:

On Saturday 22 April 2006 08:21, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

...

Maybe. In my experience, any machine translation will corrupt the original meaning so much that nobody will be able to understand it.

When did you last use Google language tools to study a problem like this?

A few minutes before sending my mail. Regards, Carl-Daniel -- http://www.hailfinger.org/

Carl Hartung wrote:

On Saturday 22 April 2006 08:38, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

...

A few minutes before sending my mail.

For the first time? ;-)

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Carl it works for "figure out" type of messages, but bug report should be precise, and even then it is not easy to figure out where to start. -- Regards, Rajko.

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006, Alexey Eremenko wrote:

Bugs written in non-english won't be resolved until somebody translates them.

Maybe since SUSE was German - it would be possible to make German bugzilla (as there are plenty of SUSE German developers)- but this trick will not work for other languages.

Having non-english bugs in bugzilla renders them virtually useless, since only a very limited number of people (depending on $language) will be able to handle those bugs. Moreover finding duplicates, classifing bugs, collaborating on bugs and much more will be impossible. Apart from that, translating back and forth with a $wiki_leader won't scale well, I guess. Regards Christoph

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006, Alexey Eremenko wrote:

1) You said about Google Translation service ? Can you give me a link ?

Actually I didn't, but here is the link: http://www.google.com/language_tools

2) How many languages are supported ?

No clue.

3) How good the translation is ?

If you are imaginative, you should be able to get the idea of what the original text content ;) IMO this isn't an option for bugzilla, as the error ratio and the additional overhead won't scale as well. Regards Christoph

So except for wiki leader back and forth translations it will no go. A wiki leader can actually translate tens of bugs effectively - maybe a hundred (small bugs) - but not scale to thousands. Anyways - this is the most effective thing for now.

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 10:41:17AM -0500, Rajko M wrote:

You touched a weak point of this group. We still have no organization with assigned or voluntarily accepted tasks. No one can say "ask Joe" how it is going in his area. Nobody is owner of anything and can take pride in accomplished work, and without that we'll score some points on enthusiasm, but not that much as we can.

So look at http://en.opensuse.org/Tasks and assign yourself to do whatever you like. People are not apointed, people must step up. When nobody steps up, nothing will be done. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

Rajko M wrote:

Who is the wiki leader? I'm not aware of any that are assigned or volunteer this :-)

the only thing that needs an assignment is the ability to edit protected pages and there are very fex (main page, for example). The user list gives the admins. for the rest it's a volunteer job. look at "team pages"

You touched a weak point of this group. We still have no organization with assigned or voluntarily accepted tasks.

read Houghi's post :-)

I agree with general idea to have person(s) that will look in forums and newsgroups for problem reports, questions etc, and take initiative to filter out true bugs from hardware problems, user (in)experience etc. Than tell user that they reported the bug and if necessary ask for more details.

please, do so :-)

Apropos bug report. A lot of users know that they have a problem, not that it is a called bug and that it is possible to file something called bug report. How many of them have ever heard about bugzilla? And all that users are valuable source of information.

look at the home page :-) but the doc need still enhancement jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://dodin.org/galerie_photo_web/expo/index.html http://lucien.dodin.net http://fr.susewiki.org/index.php?title=Gérer_ses_photos

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:55:29PM +0200, Christoph Thiel wrote:

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006, Alexey Eremenko wrote:

...

1) You said about Google Translation service ? Can you give me a link ?

Actually I didn't, but here is the link: http://www.google.com/language_tools

http://babelfish.altavista.com has 12. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau

On Saturday 22 April 2006 07:50, Alexey Eremenko wrote:

...

Apart from that, translating back and forth with a $wiki_leader won't scale well, I guess.

True, this will work with few bugs - and won't scale well - but there is no other option I know of.

1) You said about Google Translation service ? Can you give me a link ? 2) How many languages are supported ? 3) How good the translation is ?

Link: http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en The 'en' is for English... maybe try 'fr' for French or 'sp' ('es'?) for Espanol? I browsed through an entire Japanese site and many related links using this feature and the translation was decent enough that I had no problem understanding what was going on. Carl

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 09:03:43AM -0200, Alexey Eremenko wrote:

...

If a reporter does not communicate well enough in English to exchange information with the support-person on the other side, I don't think having the bugzilla interface in the local language will help.

I agree, but it still can be done through non-english (say french) wiki - while (the french) wiki leader fills the bugs in the english bugzilla.

Then a wikipage explaining what is what might be more interesting. A French (or any other language) bugzilla will confuse users. They will the be submitting bugs in their native language and these then will be ignored or there needs to be asked to translate them. Living in Belgium and having worked for many international companies, I can tell you that having one language for something like this with some people not being able to participate is better then having more people participate, be an even higher percentage not being able to understand what the others are talking about. In numbers: Say there are 100 people in each group and 50% speaks Enlish as well. German, French and Spanish people. If you do it in English, you have 150 people who can communicate and solve problems. If you do each his or her own language, you only have 100 people you can work with. Yes, that is an extremely simplified example. Also do not forget that there are many, many more then just 3 languages. houghi -- Nutze die Zeit. Sie ist das Kostbarste, was wir haben, denn es ist unwiederbringliche Lebenszeit. Leben ist aber mehr als Werk und Arbeit, und das Sein wichtiger als das Tun - Johannes Müller-Elmau