Web Forums for End-Users
I am thinking that fedora-extras-list should be dedicated solely to discussion of development issues in Extras, and NOT for user support issues. I fear that without this intent, that list will turn into another fedora-list with non-development noise making it prohibitively difficult to hear signal and have productive discussions.
This would make fedora-extras-list similar in intent to fedora-devel-list. We have tried to promote this intent with Sopwith's occasional reminder announcements, and explicit "You are off topic" mail. However enforcement has been unsuccessful, and the result is a mess of off-topic and uninteresting noise that is very time consuming to read and comprehend.
The one thing that RH engineers have the least of is time, so given the overwhelming amount of unproductive noise, too many have opted to completely ignore public Fedora lists including fedora-devel-list. This only furthers the Fedora Project's #1 problem - communication. This is a huge loss in responsiveness, accountability and transparency.
Since past efforts to improve the signal/noise ratio on devel lists have proven to be a failure, I believe we need to take a totally different approach - attack the prime vector of off-topic and unproductive posts ending up in the wrong place.
We are currently working on a plan that would shift the official project end-user support structure away from mailing lists and toward a designated web forum. It is evident that web forums are simply a better medium for end-users than mailing lists. End-users are more likely to do annoying things like quote an entire 2,000 line e-mail only to respond a sentence, break threads with broken clients, and repeatedly ask the same questions that have been answered numerous times. These problems are simply far less problematic by design in web discussion forums.
Of course this idea upsets and angers many engineer minded people. They happen to LIKE the mailing list medium, and dislike web forums for various reasons both good and bad. I give these reasons why these fears are a non-issue:
1) This would shift ONLY end-user lists, not development lists. Those same engineers are likely to ignore the end-user support lists anyway. Nothing is lost.
2) fedora-list and fedora-test-list would NOT close, they would only be less prominent. Nobody is being forced to change.
3) Web forums are simply easier to see at a glance what are the hot issues, so an occasional visit would be more immediately enlightening than trying to comprehend fedora-list and seeing trends that need to be acted upon on. It simply helps us to do our jobs better.
The current plan is for us to evaluate the existing Fedora web discussion forums during the next week. During FUDCON week we will make a final decision about which to make the official Fedora forum.
This would make fedora-extras-list similar in intent to fedora-devel-list. We have tried to promote this intent with Sopwith's occasional reminder announcements, and explicit "You are off topic" mail. However enforcement has been unsuccessful, and the result is a mess of off-topic and uninteresting noise that is very time consuming to read and comprehend.
The one thing that RH engineers have the least of is time, so given the overwhelming amount of unproductive noise, too many have opted to completely ignore public Fedora lists including fedora-devel-list. This only furthers the Fedora Project's #1 problem - communication. This is a huge loss in responsiveness, accountability and transparency.
Since past efforts to improve the signal/noise ratio on devel lists have proven to be a failure, I believe we need to take a totally different approach - attack the prime vector of off-topic and unproductive posts ending up in the wrong place.
We are currently working on a plan that would shift the official project end-user support structure away from mailing lists and toward a designated web forum. It is evident that web forums are simply a better medium for end-users than mailing lists. End-users are more likely to do annoying things like quote an entire 2,000 line e-mail only to respond a sentence, break threads with broken clients, and repeatedly ask the same questions that have been answered numerous times. These problems are simply far less problematic by design in web discussion forums.
Of course this idea upsets and angers many engineer minded people. They happen to LIKE the mailing list medium, and dislike web forums for various reasons both good and bad. I give these reasons why these fears are a non-issue:
1) This would shift ONLY end-user lists, not development lists. Those same engineers are likely to ignore the end-user support lists anyway. Nothing is lost.
2) fedora-list and fedora-test-list would NOT close, they would only be less prominent. Nobody is being forced to change.
3) Web forums are simply easier to see at a glance what are the hot issues, so an occasional visit would be more immediately enlightening than trying to comprehend fedora-list and seeing trends that need to be acted upon on. It simply helps us to do our jobs better.
The current plan is for us to evaluate the existing Fedora web discussion forums during the next week. During FUDCON week we will make a final decision about which to make the official Fedora forum.