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.
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
--
Jim Henderson
Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org