On 2011-02-11 Bryen wrote:
On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 22:58 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:42:17 +0100, Sascha Manns wrote:
I want to know one thing. You can do all the great things you do, for all the very well thought out reasons you have, inside the openSUSE project, on openSUSE infrastructure with openSUSE branding. Why don't you?
Why you're blogging in http://blog.hennevogel.de/ instead of lizards?
Where any individual blogs isn't the question, Sascha - that's very different from creating an entire portal that in effect chops up the community into smaller pieces, duplicates efforts, and adds complexity where it doesn't necessarily need to be.
I agree. That's a pretty bad interpretation. Lizards was set up as a member benefit to encourage people who don't already have their own blog sites to have a place to blog without hassle of site administration. Beyond that, the comparison is truly apples to oranges. People contribute *into* the project by writing on their blogs knowing fully well it will end up on planet.opensuse.org (note the domain is opensuse.org, not elsewhere.) By contrast, This is a "bring-in" compared to a "take out" which is what's happening by taking out OWN as well as segmenting the German community into a completely different portal outside of the community's portal.
So... why does Henne write on his own blog instead of Lizards? Because he knows he's writing *intoI the community infrastructure through an aggregation tool.
I have some concerns about this myself - and I know Rupert knows my concerns because I've talked about him in the context of the open-slx community portal's forums that are being set up.
As a member of staff in the openSUSE forums, I've been concerned about this duplication of efforts - for example, in OSF, we provide a German set of forums. There's also other German forums (linuxclub.de is one I know about), so I have to seriously wonder what benefit there is to creating yet another German set of forums on the open-slx portal. Doing so divides the expertise and makes it more difficult for people looking for help to decide where to go.
That would seem to me (from my vantage point) to create unnecessary complexity and further divide a community we should ALL be working to unite rather than to further fragment.
Reducing duplication was one of the drivers (as I understand it) behind merging several different sets of forums that provided assistance to users using openSUSE.
Looking at the Fedora community or the Ubuntu community, for example, they each seem to have a single set of forums, which provides them both with a higher degree of community cohesion. I don't think I've ever seen anyone ask the question "which forums should I go to if I have questions about [Ubuntu|Fedora]?" (This doesn't mean there aren't third-party forums, but I have never, ever seen a reference to a post in a third- party Ubuntu forum, for example)
But I could certainly see that happening here if the community doesn't come together to provide that (ideally) single place to go for information and interaction.
It is certainly a concern and opens up to great confusions. The Marketing Team, for example, has been taking great efforts to bring in communities from regions that were previously disenfranchised. And already we're seeing great results as a consequence of broadening our community. We're seeing some truly great things happening. And then at the same time, we see the #1 region (Germany) being split off. Segregated. Living in an entirely different ecosystem. All this can possibly do is diminish Germany's role in openSUSE Project, and I fail to see how that could ever be such a good thing, considering the strong contributions we have always seen from the Germans.
open-slx has done some great things for the openSUSE project, but like Henne, I have a really hard time understanding why all this duplicate effort is taking place rather than leveraging the existing infrastructure as much as possible, and answering that question with "why don't you blog on lizards.opensuse.org?" doesn't really address the underlying issue or concern. It is, as Henne said, a pretty straightforward question, and either the answer is straightforward or it isn't.
To be honest, I don't think we'll ever get a straightforward answer. It's either refusal or incapable. I don't know which and i'm truly puzzled. Myself, I did not really know much about open-SLX until about a month ago. At that point, we were asked to give our support for their portal that was about to be released a week later. We obviously took the same concerns about duplication of efforts and attempted to reach out to them to discuss, particularly the claims that in effect they've been stonewalled by inactivity within the Project. And they made claims that this has been previously discussed with the Project, and yet we could find no evidence of such. We tried to negotiate an opportunity to sit down together (via IRC) and listen to their concerns about why they felt things were not moving the way it should in the Project. But there was never any interest in talking with us.
The board was literally in a meeting drafting a final appeal to discuss and resolve issues the day before the planned launch, when during the meeting, Sebas went ahead and announced the launch, only minutes after Jos got off the phone with open-SLX making his own appeal for all of us to come together. To me, it literally felt like an in-your-face action saying "We don't care if you want to talk to us, we're going to do what we want, and just to prove it, we'll move up our launch announcement just out of spite."
At that point, i became someone who was initially open-minded and wanting to hear both sides of the story and find a positive and collaborative resolution to the matter, only to be seeing that there was no good-faith action going on. I moved from open-minded to distrustful and this is a sad thing, because I do believe that a partnership with the Project and open-SLX can be a truly positive thing. But that's not going to happen at this stage if there is an unwillingness to even engage directly with the community or contact the board if they feel there's a negative aspect to the community and things are suddenly decided without any warning ahead of reasonable time.
So... I would like to ask my own direct question here... Is there ever going to be an opportunity when we can all sit at the table and have a legitimate discussion of the pros and cons of the community and how we can fit each others' goals in a complimentary way?
This can only happen if we all start playing fairly.
Amen.
Bryen
If the answer isn't straightforward, then I would ask that rather than answering the question with another question, you just say "it isn't that simple" - or better yet - trust that we can discuss the issue in an intelligent way (and don't worry about the complexity, after all, the project members and board deal with a high degree of complexity in a lot of different ways) and come to a resolution that everyone benefits from.
Jim