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

[From: Eduardo Lima (Etrunko)]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>
> 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, ...)?
>

I agree with you 100% here. It is humanly impossible to follow each
and every communication channel. IMHO, the main point here is try to
gather the most relevant information of what's happenning on those
channels and compile a list, bringing it for the next meeting.

I'm on IRC daily, but miss the great part of discussions due to my
work activities. Again, there are some keywords that make my XChat
flash.

On ITT I usually participate on specific Canola discussions, as the
maintainer of the packages. This is definitely a point of improvement.
The same applies to the wiki.

As for myself, I think the mailing lists are the most important
channels, just as in the great majority of OSS projects.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to deal with the huge ammount of
messages we receive every day. So I'm subscribed to announce,
developers, users and community lists, and I've created some filters
to search for some keywords I consider most important.

Best Regards, Etrunko

-- 
Eduardo de Barros Lima
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
eblima at gmail.com