Martin Schlander wrote:
On Monday 08 May 2006 13:08, Pascal Bleser wrote:
At least that's my vision on how we should evolve as a community, and I've been using SUSE since 5.0 (= quite some time), waiting for these opportunities to happen. Maybe I'm just too impatient, I probably am, but I objectively think we're pretty much stuck in inertia right now.
Feedback and comments are very much appreciated :)
While I share your vision for the community and I agree we can improve in lots of ways I do think being "sick" of our community is a bit harsh.
I didn't meant to say that I'm "sick of our community". If I was "sick of our community", I wouldn't be on this list nor trying to kick off something ;)
The whole openSUSE thing is only 7-8 months old. A lot of people still don't even understand what it's all about - hence all those tech-questions on the opensuse-mailinglist. Most people I'm afraid think openSUSE is just the OSS version of SUSE Linux (including Michael Meeks judging from the latest issue of Linux Format)
ACK, I'm afraid most people don't get the "community" thing yet.
Also people need to learn that there's a real possibility of influencing the distro and community through their community efforts. Building a community takes time - and I believe we're moving in the right direction and we're growing.
A community also works as a "meritocracy". What mostly annoys me is people telling the Novell staffers "we need this", "you have to do that", "you must add that package in the distro", etc... That's just not how it works nor supposed to work. Get involved, make packages yourself, start discussion threads here to have something realistic and that fits most people, and then - when necessary - submit something to Novell staff that is as effort and painless as possible to implement.
Maybe SuSE's history of being not so open is part of the reason that the community is pretty fragmented. But I expect it'll get better.
Yes, that's the main reason for the current fragmentation of the community. The problem is very different than with most distros: SUSE *has* a strong community and a large user base (not large enough given its quality, but still). The problem is that it is very fragmented, because the link between them has been missing all those years. So IMO one of our top priorities should be to think about how to interconnect the parts of the community. Which kind of brings us to the web forum topic, amongst others. In this particular case, we failed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try again, just differently.
I'm pretty sure that any other distro/community also has a lot of people who don't give a rat's ass about the big picture and only care about getting xgl on their box as fast as possible. That's just something you have to live with.
Sure. >90% just want to get, not participate, or don't have the time to do so. That's fine I guess, as we can't do much about it ;)
Other than spending a lot of time beta-testing these last few months I've also been working on a beginner's guide to SUSE Linux. In it I try to encourage users to take part in the openSUSE community as I certainly enjoy being part of it.
Great, now that's an initiative :)
Do you plan to sell it as a book or could it be turned into a
collaborative effort ?
When I was talking about a lack of information, this is an example as
well. Unless you've barely started with it, it should be mentioned on
the wiki and possibly even be opened to other community members who'd
want to participate.
I think the "projects" page on the wiki should be enhanced a little -
the build service isn't even mentioned: http://en.opensuse.org/Projects
cheers
--
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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