On Mar 14, 2008, at 2:33 PM, Per Jessen wrote:
I beg to differ. The technology is not just for admins to decide. There are other considerations to take into account than just how to run it. For instance, in the current case, why on earth was http://forums.novell.com/ not chosen as the common platform? Everything is already implemented, almost nothing left to do. But no - presumably the "admins" didn't know that, and decided they needed to reinvent the wheel.
When you're spending the time we spend running a discussion board, you learn some things. You make some mistakes, you make some good choices. In the end, that experience makes you better qualified to make additional decisions regarding running a board. There is so much more to this project than just what software is used, or who hosts what, or what structure we have.
We're not killing two forums in order to let one stand alone. We're merging three forums to create something new, while preserving the content and membership as much as possible. We're growing and evolving the existing openSUSE forums community. We see our primary roles as forums staff as creating a positive environment for discussion, and as being caretakers of the effort and time the community spends in creating forums content. We chose to preserve that as much as possible, to evolve, rather than destroy one component in favor of another.
But since we volunteer the time, money (with the existing forums), and do the work, the technology _is_ ours to decide. It's only fair. Especially since we're already taking into account the big picture, and we've already proven we know what we're doing. We're stepping up, and making something happen. Don't we value that in our openSUSE Community? It's the nature of the community to criticize when nothing is done, and criticize when anything is done. Either way folks will complain. Too bad we can't put other things first.
We're leveraging the experience of three discussion boards into this new endeavor, and this new openSUSE Forum, a merger of three separate forums, is gonna be a huge positive for the community. Let's not get distracted by lesser issues. We're trying to build the best open source Linux community on the planet, and we all have a role to play. The existing forums are giving up something we've busted our asses to create in favor of a better option for the community. That's an honorable course, and we could use the support of the openSUSE Community as we pursue it.
Keith
--- Keith Kastorff kastorff@yahoo.com
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