New subject: [opensuse] Thoughts on "official" OpenSUSE forums

23 Feb 2006

      I joined the OpenSUSE mailing list after suseforums staff made me aware
of the dialog regarding official forums. I believe I've read every
comment on the issue via the archives and live list. I've been silent so
far, aside from some limited public dialog on suseforums.net and private
dialog with suseforums.net staff. From some comments from key
contributors to the mailing list, it appears the decision has already
been made and the mailing list is simply looking to validate the
decision they've already made by getting comments from the major players
impacted. I won't attempt to access the state of decision, other than to
comment that it was communicated to me that my input would be
appreciated.

1) community

An official sponsored forum probably won't do much for a sense of
community, unless one defines a community as having some corporate
sanction. Most folks don't think the existing Novell forums do much for
the community, and they're officially sponsored. Community is more than
Linux...in fact, IMO community doesn't really start until you've stepped
outside Linux, and began to explore each other in ways that don't depend
on technical subject matter. It's a dialog about music, movies, books,
philosophy, or politics that begins to truly define us, not what distro
we use and how much we know about it. No corporate sponsored official
community I've seen can bring that diversity to a forum, although one
might bend things a bit and say the Ubuntu or Gentoo forums do. They
aren't "corporate" in the traditional sense though, so this would be an
important question to get answered: "How much control/influence would
Novell/SUSE exercise over format/content in exchange for 'official'
sponsorship?"

2) competition between boards

Is an official community supposed to eliminate or replace the existing
forums? If so, the existing official Novell forums haven't. If the issue
is multiple discussion boards, it's far more likely that opening a
second official forum will simply add one to the mix, not provide the
consolidation intended.

3) investment of those boards already running

Those existing forums have made a significant financial investment in
the SUSE community. I don't imagine there is financial compensation in
the mix for hosting contracts or hardware investments to which those
individuals might be contractually bound. They'll be expected to eat any
commitment they've already made. Given that, wouldn't you expect them to
simply continue to run the boards? If they're paying anyway, they might
as well be running a board. This could preclude them from joining the
new official discussion board and bringing their expertise there. It
also runs the risk of diluting the pool of those commited individuals
who moderate those forums, resulting in less quality, not more. Running
a discussion board is a skill too, just like teaching, or coding.

Time goes on, things change. The time invested in the existing forums is
significant as well, and has provided a positive community atmosphere
for SUSE to date. If one is thinking of replacing them, or providing
them competition, wouldn't it be nice to have better reasons than "we
need a single place to go" or "it will build the community"? Who can
justify these reasons with any substantiative data?

4) what problem would "official" forums be designed to fix?

Building something new typically means better. What would the new
official forums be designed to fix? How would they fix it? Without clear
definition of these answers, it's quite likely any expected benefits
would not materialize. I hear people say "having an official forums
would be good", but they're not specific about what problems exist that
"official" forums will solve.

Assume the official forums are up. What will make them better than the
official forums we have today? The Novell forums aren't popular, and
don't provide the answers to the very few real reasons I've heard for
having new official forums. What will make the new forums unique enough
to help? Or would there just be another official board diluting the
community?

5) is a one size fits all solution what people want? (the size of
linuxquestions)

I know for myself, the larger the board, the less comfortable I feel. I
don't want it too small, but a place like linuxquestions.org is just too
big for me. I'm looking for more intimacy, and I like to get to know
folks. The Ubuntu forums and Gentoo forums are of the size now that one
must spend hours a day if one wants to just browse new posts, looking
for items of interest. It wouldn't bother everyone...but it's something
to consider.

6) what's changed to make this an issue now?

Given SUSE's been around for some time, and the community seems to be
quite alive and well, what's different now that makes this issue
important? If not having an Ubuntu-like discussion board was the kiss of
death for a distro, we'd have a lot of casualties...such as Fedora Core
and Mandriva.

7) is it a decision that can't be postponed without penalty?

If this is not time critical, can the decision simply be postponed until
the justification is more clear than "we don't have one, so we should"?

8) choice

Hasn't the Linux community always demonstrated a definite preference for
choice? Given that, new official forums would provide another choice,
but is another choice similar to what we have already but with a logo
gonna really provide value? I tend to believe having 100 Linux distros
goes beyond choice, and simply dilutes a precious resource pool. Would
we be traveling the same path...choice without diversity?

9) opportunity and timing

Up until Novell purchased SUSE, SUSE did not have official forums, so
some dedicated SUSE lovers filled the need. Novell tried with official
forums after the purchase, but it never took off. Is it possible the
time for making that happen without fragmenting the community has simply
passed? Could the Ubuntu forums or Gentoo forums as we know them have
been created long after smaller, less "official" forums had been filling
the need? Sometimes, the moment for certain decisions has simply passed,
and the opportunity is gone.

10) quality of support

Some people with whom I've dialogued concerning the idea of new
"official" forums have implied (or directly assumed) that official
forums would provide a higher quality of support than what we have
today. The assumption of better support or access to more advanced
expertise can only be fulfilled if something is radically different
about the proposed new "official" forums. Are there going to be Linux
developers monitoring the forums and participating in problem
resolution? Are the members of the new forums going to be immune to the
time/effort issues associated with answering tough questions and be
immune to burnout? In other words, unless there are some clear
differentiating factors with the proposed new "official" forums, I think
it unlikely we would see any quality of support improvement over
existing forums.

11) weighing the "user" vote

I'd suppose any poll or user vote would favor "official" forums. Why
not? If I had no experience from the inside of running a discussion
board and trying to build an online community, I'd simply vote yes
without thinking. I never wanted to run a discussion board...sort of
backed into it, and a tough situation with a lot of misunderstanding led
to my current role. I participated in the birth of suseforums.net out of
a real love for the community, and I hope my viewpoint today reflects
that love of community more than ever. It, on the one hand, pushes me to
favor a single place to go...as I spend a lot of time in the Gentoo
forums personally. I doubt anyone can see the Ubuntu or Gentoo
discussion boards and not be impressed by their communities. On the
other hand, my prior experience with suselinuxsupport.de, and with
suseforums.net lately has led me to believe that the SUSE community is
no less served by the existing situation than Ubuntu or Gentoo. Culture
is subtle thing, and a discussion board's culture is a huge part of it's
appeal, or lack of it. The existing SUSE discussion boards differ in
culture (both private and public), and that provides an advantage for
SUSE that Gentoo or Ubuntu can't offer. Choice works given the current
number of options; more choices, or less choices might not.

12) body of knowledge, embrace and extend?

Ideally, the "encyclopedia" of knowledge would be searchable and
indexed. It's possible the current situation with Web-based SUSE user
communities might be worsened, and not bettered by the pursuit of a
"official" forum. Given the questions and answers already posted to
existing forums, mailing lists, and USENET will never be consolidated
into one place, could the concept of a single web presence to go for
SUSE support, information, and answers be better served by an extension
of the Wiki? Perhaps a search function could be coded and built for the
Wiki that searches the current (and future) known repositories of SUSE
knowledge (mailing lists, forums, USENET, etc.) and returns the results
through the Wiki interface as clickable links? By limiting the search to
known repositories, we could create a faster, more focused search than
is currently attainable by global search engines like Google. A user
could be directed to the Community page of the Wiki in the event his/her
search is unproductive to engage those communities directly. This
particular idea of course, might only be the beginning of a better idea
that presents itself in dialog. We preserve the choice the Open Source
community has come to expect, but virtualize the interface? I would
suspect this comes closer to a solution that all of us (especially the
existing web forums) can get behind and fully commit to.

Is it possible, or probable, that the _best_ solution is to build on
what we have, and not compete with or replace what exists, but embrace
and extend the SUSE community? Backwards compatibility? (LOL)

Keith

-- 
Keith Kastorff
kastorff@yahoo.com

Thoughts on "official" OpenSUSE forums

Keith Kastorff

houghi

Wolfgang Rosenauer

jdd

Eberhard Moenkeberg

Pascal Bleser

jdd

houghi

jdd

houghi

Eberhard Moenkeberg

jdd

Storm

Keith Kastorff

Eberhard Moenkeberg

Justin Larmon

houghi

Peter Flodin

Eberhard Moenkeberg

Peter Flodin

houghi

Peter Flodin

tags

participants (9)