On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 22:00 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:
On Tuesday 09 September 2008 05:21:43 pm Will Stephenson wrote:
Right, we jump over backwards to discuss strategy openly in the KDE IRC meetings. I notice that many people active in the KDE3/4 thread aren't at those meetings, so maybe we need to work on the perception of our openness.
Just to add me to the list of those that are unable to attend, and even on rare days that timing is right (vacation), I type to slow for IRC.
I'm not sure why is such pressure to use IRC when it has one major problem for world wide community, time zones. Having more meetings in different times doesn't solve the problem how to synchronize discussions and decisions, and how to bring in relevant people that can give answers.
Look at the map: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Community/Map and see distribution of users. It is not exact, but it is for sure proportional to actual number of people using openSUSE. For North America alone is not easy to find good time on a work day. IRC might be option for the weekend, but even it is not easy to synchronize all.
The only soultion is email as we use it now, or forums.opensuse.org with new forum Meetings that will have somewhat different rules than the rest to accommodate dependable access via NNTP interface.
First off, I do want to thank the Novell teams and the project as a whole for having meetings on IRC, and I do think they are an ideal place to hold meetings. That being said, it *is* a valid point that for some, IRC is simply too inaccessible for a variety of reasons. The main reason, I see, is timezones. Believe me, the teams are keenly aware of that challenge and we've never been able to truly find a good timezone that accommodates at least 75% of the world. But here's some of the reasons why an email-meeting wouldn't be effective: - Just as IRC is inaccessible due to timezones and time constraints, so too are mailing lists also somewhat inaccessible due to people not wanting to be on too many mailing lists, primarily because they don't want to be bombarded with long threads. That's a turn off for many unfortunately, no matter how much good is harvested from a thread. - To adequately discuss each topic in a meeting would require each topic to have its own unique thread. How do you end the thread? How do you vote? Threads have a life of their own and can go on for long periods (as we've seen recently.) - Which mailing list does a thread (topic) appropriately belong to? This KDE thread is a good example. The discussion of KDE3 vs. 4 is more of an interest for KDE users, but when it was brought up to postpone the release of 11.1, that became a topic of interest for everyone in openSUSE. We certainly didn't know that was going to be proposed when the thread started. Do we move the thread to a larger-scope mailing list when that happens, and possibly lose people who were on the original mailing list but not on the new mailing list? (or vice-versa) - As with any meeting, many topics are discussed in a meeting. If we moved meetings to mailing lists, progress would come to an almost complete standstill. But all those things I said still doesn't address the fact that IRC is still not ideal for many people. Many of you whom have valuable input. In openSUSE-GNOME, we post weekly agendas and have a space for people to submit their questions if they cannot attend. I'm sure KDE does the same. Personally, I've never seen anyone actually submit a question. I have some ideas for how we can close the gap between IRC and mailing lists/forums, but this is the -factory mailing list. Perhaps it is more appropriate for us to start a new thread on -project to build some consensus on how to handle that. What do you all think? I don't want to start a thread unless people are interested in discussing possible solutions to this. Bryen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org