[maemo-developers] How to destroy your community

[From: Nathan Anderson]

>>
As maemo transitions to a much larger server farm, there have been hiccups.
The site has been slow, but has recently gotten significantly faster, in
certain parts. Tero is right though, you just haven't been here long enough
to have a reliable sample of uptime vs. downtime with regards to maemo.org.
<<

	I would disagree; a major "hiccup" is a hour of down time, a hiccup
is the service being restarted.    A disaster is this "ongoing" weekend, and
still having several primary services broken and/or totally non-functional.
You just don't run a ISP service where you can't fix things in a timely
fashion.   I have been here for quite a while; and servers just have not
been really reliable for the most part (growth can do that -- but I think
the warning signs about this ISP should have occurred when it took until
late Dec/early Jan to provision the equipment when I believe it was on the
Sprint task in Oct); I've also had to ping several people to get things
kicked to make them start working again.  Nokia/Maemo != Reliability

	 I understand Tero and others have been working hard; but this move
is still is a complete "fail" in how to move properly.   My guess is the
initial planning wasn't done properly or due diligence with the new isp
wasn't done -- I can't think of a "good" excuse for this weekend with any
decent isp host.  I could have easily provisioned several servers and got
them all setup, communicating and running with either of my own "personal"
projects or my companies fairly complex sites and had them fully functional
in under an hour.  I just don't understand; Autobuilder, Repositories, &
Mailing Lists all still being broken several days after the move.



>> 10) "Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company 
>> which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is 
>> the most effective community destroyer of them all. "

Here is what I would like to know, since this has been a fiasco:
1. What servers do we have?  Type, & what do they each do?  (i.e. 1 - HP
3080 2Ghz 8GB, 100GBHD, - handles Autobuilder, Community Mailling Lists)
2. What is the approx cost that Nokia is funding for this.
3. Who has access to them.

This info would be great to drop in a wiki page.  I might be a small fry,
but I personally deal with two distinct webfarms for a couple high
availability web sites.  I'm sure their our others who have even more
experience than I do; together we might be able to help make sure the
infrastructure is sound.

 
> You do get many things done, but your communication style isn't polite. I
do understand that controversy can bring about change, but it can also
polarize situations.

>>Ooops! No silence here! I guess that disproves point 10. :-)
(http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ <-- More non-silence.) <<

	Actually I don't consider "jaaksi" a place of contact or even
someone reliably involved "community" wise with Maemo.   His blog posts are
for the most part marketing and imho pointless.  You want contact with
Nokia, Quim is the person to chat with, he is imho the "man" for any real
contact with Nokia.  And he does get things done reliably to the best of his
ability!  He is our critical link/lifeline to Nokia.   There are a couple
other Nokians, that you can chat with on the mailing lists and TMO for
certain specific issues, but for most issues Quim can get you pointed in the
right direction.  (btw, Thanks Quim!)



>>There is plenty of room for criticism, just try to be polite so that the
tenor and tone remain positive enough for people to get work done and not
get distracted by pejorative attacks. <<

	I would agree be polite!   Also don't dismiss the newer members (Not
directed at you Jeremiah).  Not only do they have fresh perspective; They
see the site for how it is "now" which is what all the other new users of
the n900 will see the site.  They don't care about how it was during the
Nokia 770 days.  They care about how it is now!  (I also care about now, I
don't really care that you had to walk up hill both ways when the Nokia 770
was released <G>)

For the end users they have seen:
1. Unreliable access to software
2. OVI store "coming soon" for months
3. The entire repositories down this weekend.
4. TMO unreliability


For developers add:
1. Lots of Autobuilder issues
2. Garage Issues
3. Mailing list issues (Both Garage and these)
4. zip/gz issues
5. bugzilla lost data 
6. SDK rootstraps replacement 
7. Wiki Issues
8. DNS issues.

These all are reflections not only on the community but on Nokia.  The "end"
user isn't going to know that Maemo is not Nokia.  And in some cases these
services are provided by Nokia.  But for the purposes of "perspective", it
all just looks like Nokia hasn't a clue on how to run things.  And if Nokia
hasn't a clue, then why would I recommend the n900 to my friends.  I think
Jeff Moe has a very valid point, we need to take a hard look at what we can
do to improve the situation now and in the future.   We also probably need
to figure out what we did wrong (& what was outside our control, i.e. a
unreliable ISP)

Nathan
P.S. Even though I didn't need to use the Mirrors, Thank you Jeff Moe for
providing them; they helped a lot of people while the primaries were down!