Hi! On 7 May 2015 at 09:13, Efstathios Iosifidis <iefstathios@gmail.com> wrote:
2015-05-07 7:53 GMT+03:00 jdd <jdd@dodin.org>:
Le 07/05/2015 00:30, Efstathios Iosifidis a écrit :
Hello my friends,
Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the conference due to family health problems.
I saw the project meeting and I totally agree with Henne. Actually I was preparing a post about part of what he said. Here it is: https://lizards.opensuse.org/2015/05/06/developing-developers/
It doesn't matter if the product is the best (SLEbased, SLEless, Tumbleweed). If there are no end users to use and promote it (because usually developers don't), then it's useless to have it.
Find out WHY you do what you do and just go out and engage people (as I mention, the term marketing leeds to profits-money). Go to events, bring more people (prefer end users) to community and just help them engage-grow.
Help end users to find themselfs in the community. If they like it, they'll become developers. If they're not interested in developing, they'll help make our project fantabulous.
The problem with this theory is that it just isn't backed up by reality. We have spent over 9 years targeting "Everyone, Everywhere" We do go to more events than we ever have before, with more materials, and much higher quality materials And sure, in terms of end users, this strategy has brought in more users than ever before, the statistics shown at oSC 13 showed that we were growing well 2 years ago, and more recently 13.2's Download numbers show that the trend has continued, and probably accelerated. But what about contributions? Technical contributions to Tumbleweed are skyrocketing - just look at the Changelogs posted each week, and that's great But technical contributions to the Regular Release are in decline. Building 13.2 fell on the shoulders of a few people. We had something like 14 bugs found during the 13.2 Beta phase. And anecdotally, I have a strong feeling that Bugs reported in 13.2 are less likely to get fixed, often because the contributors are focused on Tumbleweed, and if its fixed there, its hard to justify the extra work to get it working on 13.2 when (in our old development model) 13.3 would be around the corner 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. We have lots of people willing to step up and complain about these problems, but when we look around and call for volunteers to actually help, like we did for the 13.2 release process, or oSC 15, we're very lucky if we get anyone helping at all Just saying we need to 'develop new developers' is a lot easier said then done - mentoring takes a lot of time and effort, and relatively few of our developer contributors have the extra time required to do that. And so, the current situation is not sustainable - we need to find a way of enticing the right people into our Project and to help us improve it, not just consume the awesome things we're outputting 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org