elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Craig Errington <craigerrington@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just a quick addendum:

The reason you guys haven't heard of it fully (developers) is that
this has only really been advertised to the members of the Google+
community (those already involved and active, but not neccessarily
developers).

I've also been keen to hold off on fully advertising the existence of
the site before Luna is officially launched - But from day one of Luna
launching, I wanted a good ammount of discussion and history in place
so it doesn't look "blank" when I advertise to the community at large.

I'm fully prepared to take any critical comments, and suggestions that
could help my site fit better into your wider ecosystem, and I am
happy to edit out anything on the forums that you'd rather no appear
there (dailies build instructions). But specifically, in my mind, that
would go so far in the face of the actual purpose of Open Source.

(On the last line, open source, my mind is probably a little bit
closed. I'm a full on supporter of open source, the whole concept of
"anyone can play". I'm a member of the FSF Europe).

On 4 May 2012 14:01, Craig Errington <craigerrington@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Sergey,
>
> Thanks for taking the time to reply to this.
>
> Just to be clear, before I launched the forums (which are of course
> *unofficial*, community driven) I spoke to Cassidy James about the
> idea.
>
> I was pointed to previous discussion trails on the G+ page, and was
> pointed to the previous concerns from devs that a set of forums
> managed by the elementary team wasn't something they wanted - and an
> "unoffical" set of forums could be a way forward.
>
> I've also purchased (and so far, done nothing with)
> elementaryusers.org - which is where I was going to host (as you've
> suggested yourself) a community wiki.
>
> I take onboard all the quotes you've outlined before, but I'd like to
> point out, that the welcome message you're quoting was written before
> I had really "soaked" myself into the elementary community. I found
> the Jupiter iso online, installed it on my PC, realised it was the
> cleanest linux distro I had ever used and fell in love. When I
> realised that there weren't any community forums, I decided to fill a
> gap.
>
> Cassidy has been on the forums, and has made a point of trying to
> direct users to the correct official support methods, the "answers"
> section on elementaryos.org for example.
>
> Where you've quoted the section about "got an idea to make elementary
> better? post it here" - again, this is aimed at *users* of elementary,
> to discuss ideas amongst themselves.
>
> I understand the concerns of wanting all the info in one place
> (elementaryos.org), but I also see a need for a free flowing area for
> people to just "talk" about the project. Not a developer on launchpad,
> not joining mailing lists or hanging around on IRC.
>
> My main target is to have a community of eos users across a selection
> of community resources, centered around elementaryusers.org -
> specifically non-official, free flowing, open.
>
> The ubuntuforums.org is a glowing example of the type of thing I'm
> trying to achieve. UF.org ended up part of the official project, which
> isn't my aim.
>
> Especially as this is an open source project, expecting that control
> can be kept on what users do and discuss amongst each other is like
> trying to shovel water with a spade. I'm very much of the opinion that
> having something unofficial (like my site) managed by someone who
> keeps an active interest in the actual elementary project is a great
> thing. And somewhere where *fans* can *discuss* (not just ask a direct
> question) is also only a good thing.
>
> Just to reiterate, the forums were intended to be fully separate from
> the elementary project, and I discussed the idea with community leader
> before going ahead.
>
> I'll make a point of going through a re-design, make it incredibly
> clear that it's a non-connected website, and have permanant links back
> into the elementaryos.org sections in question.
>
> Thanks
>
> Craig
>
> On 4 May 2012 13:24, Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> 2012/5/4 Craig Errington <craigerrington@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>
>>> I run elementaryforums.org - which to be honest, is where some people
>>> are probably figuring out how to do the nightlies iso build.
>>
>>
>> Well, that's a wrong place to figure that out. The right place for technical
>> questions is https://answers.launchpad.net/elementaryos - and it already
>> holds an answer.
>>
>> Also, I'm a little surprised that this is the first time I hear about the
>> forums. Of course nobody can keep track of everything elementary going on
>> (except Cody Garver, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand
>> gnomes working undercover. None of the individual gnomes keep track of
>> everything either, they just work together really well), but at least I try
>> to :)
>>
>> Quoting http://elementaryforums.org/discussion/2/elementaryforums-launched :
>>
>>> Hello, and welcome to elementaryForums.org, a new set of forums for
>>> members of the elementary community; users, developers and interested
>>> outsiders are all welcome.
>>
>>
>> It would be a good idea to at least post an announcement to this list if you
>> want developers to get involved. Though developers already have two places
>> to communicate - IRC and this list, and I don't think we need a third one.
>> Moreover, forums work really poorly for developer communication (trust me,
>> I've tried it - using a forum for communication killed a project of mine
>> before I discovered mailing lists).
>>
>>> Just thought of an something that would make elementary better?
>>
>>
>> I've described the process of proposing ideas to the project at
>> http://elementaryos.org/journal/how-see-what%E2%80%99s-our-sleeves and it
>> didn't change much since then, I recommend sticking to it. I recall Dan
>> saying that forums is the last place he'd visit looking for ideas, so I'm
>> afraid this is not going to work.
>>
>>>
>>> Found a guide elsewhere online? Well get going, start a new discussion.
>>
>>
>> The best thing to do is to show it to developers, here or in IRC, instead of
>> spreading it. Following some random guide found on the internet is not a
>> brilliant idea. Often the author doesn't realize the consequences of what
>> they advise to do; many "hotfix" howtos fix one thing just to break the
>> other.
>>
>>> One of my driving factors behind launching these forums, was how hard I
>>> found it to get some up-to-date information about elementary (How is luna
>>> coming along? Can we try a development build? Can we build it ourselves?) -
>>> so we can help fix this problem for others.
>>
>>
>> Well, Launchpad announcements are supposed to provide development status
>> info: http://elementaryos.org/journal/launchpad-announcements
>> And we'll also have categorized answers in the new website and there's a
>> "rumors" category. It's not a here-and-now solution, though.
>>
>>> The aim here is to try and centralise elementary OS information and guides
>>> to a wider, not necessarily developer community (with launchpad accounts
>>> etc).
>>
>>
>> This is a good idea actually, I agree a community-driven knowledge base
>> would be useful, e.g. for covering weird use cases which can't be covered by
>> out-of-the-box configuration and/or the official user guide. However, forums
>> don't really work as knowledge hubs. Wikis do. Imagine http://mlp.wikia.com
>> as a forum... that would be a terrible mess and you wouldn't be able to find
>> any info easily without digging through 30-pages-long threads.
>>
>> So I recommend figuring out what problem exactly you're trying to solve and
>> choosing the appropriate tool for that (or maybe several tools). And please
>> consult with our web team in #elementary-web on FreeNode - I believe most
>> problems can be solved using elementaryos.org so users don't have to
>> discover external websites and search several sources to get the desired
>> info.
>>
>> --
>> Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff