------- Original Message ------- On Thursday, May 26th, 2022 at 10:46 PM, Jim Henderson <hendersj@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 25 May 2022 22:13:36 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
It is however a pity when this causes a fragmentation of communication, because that is also a fragmentation of the community. We have long had enough of that. (e.g. forums / mailing lists).
There are really two schools of thought about that - one is that you go where the users are, the other is that you require the users come to you.
The latter used to work really well, but now with the proliferation of non-affiliated sites like stackoverflow, communities (and sub- communities) can self-organize wherever they want to. The onus is now less on the people in those communities to go to the 'official' venues; it's more now on the 'sponsor' (not quite the right word, but it'll suffice) to be aware of those venues and to incorporate them into their community plan (or not, and to just let those unofficial places organically grow).
All true, however the brdiges are a great way to keep things connected and avoid fragmentation. With that said we should probably not connect the user base to the developers if we want to keep our volunteers sane.
On the Facebook group, for example, we strongly encourage difficult/ complex technical questions go to the forums, where threading is easier to follow and there is more technical expertise. If it's a development- related question, we direct them to bugzilla and the MLs. But I'm always surprised at how many people insist "no, I asked here, don't send me somewhere else, just answer my question" - even when the expertise in the FB group just doesn't exist.
This is true for most platforms I think, but for instance on Telegram, Discord and Matrix (all bridged) we do have the expertise to help with more complex things before opening a ticket on Bugzilla. This kind of community support is actually pretty good to also remove the added burden from the developers, maintainers. The forums would be a much better place? Sure, but our forums are outdated in terms of UI/UX. I don't like to use it either which is said since - as you said it too - we do have the best expertise there, and the most amount of knowledge. I think the move to Discourse has been a long standing topic as well which I think would move to forums to a current, modern forum tech with a better UI/UX which would probably benefit everyone.
Unfortunately, I don't see this trend reversing itself. Either we go where the users are, or we just don't talk to them until our community platforms entice them to come over to the 'official' spaces, and there's a lot of inertia to overcome in order for that to happen.
I think in terms of "Official" the other platforms listed on https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Communication_channels should be considered official communication channels. Some channels has a larger user base in their community than registered members overall in the Project. Not every user wants to have an openSUSE account, or want to use the forums as David pointed it out, rightfully so. Developers in the project has been long relying on their choice of communication platforms so not much need to change that, and it is well within their right to pick the platform they see best fit their needs. Users on the other hand IMO shouldn't interact with developers directly. FOSS projects seen the issues with that and continue to suffer that burden. I would keep developer communications separate from user space, for example I wouldn't bridge the KDE IRC with the Telegram openSUSE group, but would bridge it with say the Discord or Telegram KDE group for contributors to easily interact with each other. This is up to the contributors or the project though, and not a decision that should be made by the anyone else. If X project decides to keep everything on IRC and doesn't care about other platforms that is fine, but they will be just walled of from new contributors who would be interested to help out, but doesn't know how to use IRC or simply doesn't want to. Bridges solving that. If developers wishes to also provide support or interact with the community of users they can pick the group to go to, but their space is not getting spammed by feature or support requests. Lastly Bugzilla ticket should only be opened when something is actually broken. The community support is actually pretty good at helping out with this one, and upgrading the forums would be a great service to further strengthen that effort. May have went a bit off their.. Anywho, it is possible that I see this matter a lot less gloomy since solutions do exist. Problem starts when the solution gets ignored ^_^ This would be a pretty good topic for a community meeting which we have twice a week. -- Br, A.