On 10 June 2018 at 11:58, George from the tribe <tech@reachthetribes.org> wrote:
What do all those things mean? It means we are a group of human beings, imperfect, all trying to make something work better and trying to help each other in our imperfect ways. Sometimes someone may have a bad day and post something more negative than he/she would normally post. I think we should just remember that we are all fellow human beings trying to make this work, and don't want to be subject to an organization that forces some kind of centralized control, like Microsoft. In any human community there will be strong and weak feelings, experts and novices, and everything else that encompasses interactive human behavior.
So even with the all the difficulties, I have always felt that this list functions well, in exactly the way it was designed. A general mailing list that promotes the development of a community of users, and these users help each other.
My first look for keeping up with opensuse, especially when I am very busy with other things, is to check this list. A lot of times I don't have time to go and look at multiple forums or multiple other lists. But I try not to miss keeping up with this list.
Anyway, I hope that adds some value to the discussion.
It does, and in many ways you sum up many of my own feelings about this list now. But I feel there is an important clarification to add This list is "a community of users", not "the community of users". And this is part of the problem The list is named opensuse@opensuse.org - not opensuse-users@ or opensuse-chat@ but the name brings with it an implicit "officialness" which is hard to shake. Like you say yourself you use this list for your "first look" on keeping up with opensuse And yet the simple fact is that the general disconnect between the regulars of this list and the general direction of the Project is vast. This list is regularly home to many negative discussions about many things which the openSUSE community-at-large have embraced for years now. As examples, systemd, Leap, Tumbleweed all have regular time getting scorn from vocal members of this community, when the simple facts are the community at large not only support such things, they built them. Despite the openSUSE community growing in significant numbers, both in terms of users and contributors, we see the readership of this list remaining mostly static - which strongly implies that disconnect between _this_ community and the _wider_ openSUSE community risks just getting wider and wider. The perception that this list is home to vocal malcontents have proven to be impossible to counter via any means, subtle or direct. People can recall some of the negative feedback I received in response to some of those direct efforts I and the Board were involved in. There are people on this list spewing hateful vitriol in my direction to this day. With the exception of Per and Carlos, I can't easily name any of the regular participants of this list as active contributors to the project. And that is too small a starting point to realistically bridge the gap. So speaking individually I have given all hope of encouraging many contributors to participate in this list. I currently hold no hope that this list will ever reflect the opensuse community at large. Which is why I fully support the Board's current efforts to establish opensuse-support@ as a new, official, project-wide support list. I have hope there we can build something the project needs; a support list where the majority of participants are aligned with the current direction of the project. And we can attempt doing so without directly impeding the separate, unique community that has formed on this list. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org