On Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:25:33 -0500, Rajko M. wrote:
On Thursday 24 June 2010 13:35:54 Jim Henderson wrote:
The three of us are very geographically distributed - I'm in Utah, Carl is in the UK, and John is in Australia - if I remember correctly.
The mod team is similarly distributed globally. Not that that's a huge problem for getting some to attend such a discussion, of course, but something to be aware of (as I'm sure everyone here is since the entire project is highly distributed geographically).
Which makes idea to use forums easier to accept :)
I mentioned few times that distributed community should resort to different meeting medium and procedure.
I believe there's room for both synchronous and asynchronous communication - both have their place, and both have advantages and disadvantages. Interestingly (perhaps), this is something that in my day job we're looking at as well - I work in Novell's training department, and we're doing a lot of work around the differences between instructor-led classroom training (synchronous) and on-demand (asynchronous) methods of learning and distributing knowledge. Carlos Ribeiro's post from about 3 hours ago reminded me that something I'd like to see pursued is some community development of open Linux (and openSUSE specifically) training material development. But that's certainly a topic for a different thread.
Forum via NNTP interface can be good, there is no lag, message is stored, and agenda can be discussed using one thread per topic, or list item, unlike this email discussion, it will be easy to focus on items that one wants to discuss and leave out those that are out of interest. Problem is that messages are not displayed, so reader has to go back and forth between messages to read discussion.
There is a little bit of lag - gating the messages back and forth between the NNTP server and the web interface is a cron job that runs every 10 minutes.
The web interface can be used too, but it should be way simpler then current. Something that will allow more lines per page, some indentation to mark threading. In short simulation of IRC window with ability to add comments right behind messages. Maybe that can be achieved with CSS?
We are in the process of upgrading the forum software; one of the guidelines (maybe closer to "rule") is that we don't want to do very heavy customization of the interface because that interferes with software updates and increases testing time for any updates (security patches in particular) that may need to be rolled out quickly. That said, there are generally a couple of templates available; we're always open to suggestions, but the acceptance does have the caveat that it not require template changes - CSS shouldn't, I don't think, require any recoding (we're using the opensuse.org site template with the update - there's a screenshot from the staging servers at: http://thumbnails26.imagebam.com/8566/d01d5085654103.jpg The web interface (structure, look/feel) is something that has been the subject of much debate in the forums. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org