On 05/13/2015 02:02 AM, Akash Vishwakarma wrote:
Hi,
On 07-May-2015 2:58 pm, "Richard Brown" <RBrownCCB@opensuse.org> wrote:
Hi!
And in the case of all of the other, non-developer contributions, the situation we face in our community right now is pretty ugly. We basically don't have a marketing team any more, the wiki doesn't get the attention and polish it deserves, our admin team are working at full capacity and need more help, and so on and so forth.
What has the existing community done to overcome this trend? What have they done to encourage the desktop users to contribute to the project?
And so, the suggestion from the Board that we steer the Project in a direction that directly targets 'Makers', an audience which primarily encapsulates sysadmins and developers, but also users who overlap these audiences and/or aspire in that direction
This is an area we're already strong in, technically, and we think we'll be able to attract the kind of people who naturally, and easily, are able to both use, benefit from, and contribute back to openSUSE
This isn't an 'abandonment' of our other users, openSUSE will still work for them as well as it does today, hopefully better, but I think it's very important that openSUSE has clear direction, a clear target, which allows us to apply focus to improve our offerings for those people, and hopefully in return get more new blood into the community who can contribute back and continue the upward trajectory we currently have.
Regards,
Richard --
Who'd contribute to non-technical aspects of project? Desktop Users I guess. And the technical contributions will be made by developers and system administrators. So, if openSUSE is made more developer centric then, how many users are going to use openSUSE. And how many users are going to contribute?
I suggest before making openSUSE a developer centric project, the openSUSE.org website gets updated (as shown in Roberts keynote) with a link to contributions page on every *.openSUSE.org page. Then wait for sometime to see if users start contributing.
I've been using openSUSE as my default GNU/Linux distro for last two years and have been visiting www.openSUSE.org at least once a month, but never came to know about https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:How_to_participate. I only came to know about it when I became interested in packaging. I googled "packaging on openSUSE" and one of the search results landed me there.
And even though I somehow reached that page I didn't came to know about openFATE from wiki. I came to know about openFATE from forums.openSUSE.org
And what does portal: how to participate tell - participate, document, develop, spread, lead, release it. I wish the page also described what those string of texts mean. Then it would have lead me (or other users) to click on those on those links. Else why would anyone want to click on those links.
I have similar questions, I was using openSUSE for 2 years before I realised there was a forum, and that was only because someone told me a issue was raised there on a package I was maintaining. I also don't understand what connect provides that isn't provided on the forum or social media or wiki etc, I always found it quite confusing. I think what needs to happen with our web presence is the board as the projects guiding presence needs to sit down and come up with a idea of what our web presence should be to best facilitate these goals there outlining, questions like what elements do we actually want and need. As well as who are we targetting, the last web front page concept I saw was targeting end users with very little for technical people or people looking for ways to contribute which is the opposite of who we are apparently now targeting. After there is some clear idea the board should then probably put out a call (blog, social media, forums) for a team to refresh the web infrastructure, as this is such a key component it would be ideal if this team was being lead by someone on the board. It would surprise me if we couldn't find some people in the community with the time and experience to help once there is a clear plan of what needs to be done. If people can't be found maybe the board needs to decide that this is a critical thing for openSUSE to succeed and approach some sponsors to help make it happen. In my opinion a well setup web presence is going to do alot more to attract new contributors then conferences etc, On a unrelated point I think if we are targeting power users we need to be careful not loose the ease of use of the stable distro because that will start to cause people to go other places particularly technical people new to Linux and such people should become a good target base for finding new contributors. Cheers Simon Lees openSUSE Enlightenment Maintainer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org