[impdev] What to do with the forums?

[Morgaine]

What a wierd post, Jacek!  I tend to side with the dev viewpoint because of
personal background, but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here.

To paraphrase it rather uncharitably, you seem to be saying "Our community
is happily communicating using our ad hoc medium X, but we want the
straightjacket medium Y which is better for developers, feedback please".
You give no justification for Y as a community medium, and there is no
indication whatsoever that the community outside devs has the remotest bit
of interest in Y.  I'm sure that you have good dev reasons for Y, but unless
the community shares those reasons, you're not heading for a winning
strategy,

Now I understand the purpose of an appropriate medium for development, or
several of them, because development is a very focused discipline.  But that
is leagues away from a friendly community medium, and I think you may be
mixing the two in your mind.  The vast majority of Impy and future Kokua
"feedback people" are not going to be developers, they're going to be users
with varying degrees of technical awareness.  Devs are the minority.  You
need both.  You need the buzz of non-devs chatting to each other and
reinforcing their interest.

The blog is not a community medium.  It's a top-down announcement delivery
system which marginalizes the community, because all community input is
effectively lost as soon as the next blog post appears.  It would be a
severe mistake to replace the forums with the blog, exactly the same mistake
that Linden Lab made.  Their old forums were extremely vibrant and full of
detailed community communication, whereas their new "forums" (which are
really just a blog) are completely and utterly useless except for a few
people who use them for ranting.  Linden wanted control and  focus, and as a
result they now own a wasteland.

Imprudence has a great community at present.  Don't lose that just because
you feel a manager's need for restructuring.

Dev and community communications don't work the same way.  I would not
advise trying to merge them into a single "efficient" system, because you
risk losing something valuable.


Morgaine.




=============================

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Jacek Antonelli <jacek at kokuaviewer.org>wrote:

> As you know, I've been working on redefining and documenting our
> communications policy, including the purposes of our many
> communications channels (issue tracker, wiki, etc.). Now I'm
> contemplating the forums, and trying to decide what their purpose is
> (or should be), and what to do with them. I would very much appreciate
> your thoughts and feedback about this topic.
>
> Consider that right now we have 5 forum sections (not counting "Off
> Topic"), and 4 of them are pretty much obsolete:
>
> * Viewer: This is where people would post ideas, feature requests,
> etc. But we're now using only the issue tracker for feature requests.
> * Problems & Troubleshooting (previously "Bug Reports &
> Troubleshooting"): This is where people would post bug reports,
> problems they are having, and provide feedback about releases. But
> we're now using only the issue tracker for bug reports, and blog posts
> for general feedback about releases.
> * Development: This is where people would discuss development-related
> stuff, technical discussions of features, get help compiling the
> viewer, etc. But we're now encouraging use of the mailing list and IRC
> for those things.
> * Project: This is where people would discuss project organization
> issues and report problems with the website. But we're now using the
> issue tracker for website issues, and project organization discussion
> is done via the mailing list and meetups.
> * General: All other discussion. The only reason this isn't obsolete
> too is because its purpose is so vague.
>
> My instinct is to archive (lock to prevent new posts) all the current
> forum sections and create new sections with new purposes. But, I'm
> having a hard time thinking of what those purposes would be.
>
> In the past, I've argued that the forums are useful as a social hub
> for the community (see e.g. http://www.plurk.com/p/amzlet ). If that's
> true, then the new sections would be social-oriented. But aside from a
> section for general Kokua/Imp-related discussion, the only things I
> can think of are a place for people to introduce themselves, and
> possibly a place to ask for help from other users. (But for the
> latter, we already have inworld groups and a Q&A site
> <http://support.kokuaviewer.org/qa/>.)
>
> So, my question is: do the forums provide any real use or value in the
> new organization? Should we keep them, or archive them completely? If
> keep them, for what purpose(s)? What sections should there be?
>
> - Jacek
> _______________________________________________
> ImpDev mailing list
> ImpDev at lists.imprudenceviewer.org
> http://lists.imprudenceviewer.org/listinfo.cgi/impdev-imprudenceviewer.org
>
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