[maemo-community] A rant on 25th-hour hysterics...

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi Brian,

Brian Waite wrote:
> 2) Primarily for the first ever committee, but also for future
> committees, I think it is important to have people who do have the time,
> energy, and motivation to follow ALL the communications formats to hold
> prominent roles. In fact they often do. I am sure every one of us has a
> prioritzed list of people on ITT/list/wiki for whom their opinion weighs
> more than others. Thoes are the people who will steer this boat most
> effectively, as they are really already doing it informally.

I can only speak for myself, but when I see someone say this, I know
that they do not follow all the communications channels.

I know this, because I tried, when I started, and found myself spending
all my time not being able to follow everything. I was on IRC, following
the forums, tracking 2 wikis, had Planet Maemo and a bunch of other
tablet related news sites in my rss feed, and of course subscribed to
all the maemo mailing lists I needed to be on and started watching Bugzilla.

I have probably missed some...

Things started backing up straight away. If I was working on something
for a couple of hours, I'd come back to 50 new itT posts, 3 new blog
entries, an interesting conversation on IRC, 20 emails from various
lists, and of course a bunch of other non-maemo stuff. Just keeping up
was a full-time job, and I was being *paid* to do this.

When wikipedia got installed, it only got harder. I subscribed to the
Recent_Changes RSS feed at one stage, and shut it off after 2 days, when
it had 1500 unread entries. I have since mastered the wiki - watch
pages, and set a preference to be emailed when a page you're watching
changes. You only get mailed once per change, and the next time you
visit, the counter is reset to zero.

All this is to say that I don't expect *anybody* (including Nokia
employees or contractors) to follow all the forums that are available in
Maemo. What I do expect is that the people who are invested in a forum
like itT to bridge to other communication channels when there's
something important happening - pointing to forum threads that really
should be brought to people's attention on the mailing lists, or
summarising a mailing list discussion in a wiki page, or writing an
email to the mailing list with a proposition to come out of an IRC
discussion, etc.

I would establish one golden rule - there should be one place where
everyone can reasonably expect to keep up to date with what's happening
around Maemo. I suggest that one place is the maemo-developers mailing
list or the maemo-community mailing list. It's definitely not planet
maemo, or IRC, or itT, or the wiki.

I'd love to hear from the candidates on this. What forums do you guys
follow in Maemo (including project mailing lists, subversion, ...)?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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