On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 11:24 AM, AllenJB <gentoo-lists@...> wrote:
> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>>
>> On 19:06 Wed 11 Mar     , Thilo Bangert wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> the presumption seems to be, that as a dev one has to be available via
>>>>> IRC. it has long been my feeling that Gentoo as a project could realize more
>>>>> of its potential by better integrating people who dont do IRC.
>>
>> I think IRC helps to build a more tightly knit community and, because of
>> this, is very important to Gentoo. The less close we are as a community, the
>> more free we feel to be hostile because we don't see the folks on the other
>> end of the big tube as real people. It's much like a technique that
>> militaries use during wars to de-personalize the enemy, except with the
>> Internet, we start that way and have to apply effort to grow closer.
>>
>
> While it may be tight nit, there's the danger that it's so tight no one else
> can get in, so to speak.
>
> I don't think anyone's saying anything like "no more IRC". What I at least
> am advocating is that what goes on on IRC gets summarized somewhere in
> addition. As I said before, this not only helps keep a "log" of what goes on
> for "future generations", but also allows others (users and devs who don't
> have time to follow everything) to look in and follow what the devs are
> doing more easily.

I think that summarizing "IRC" is insane.  Remember we barely got
summaries of council meetings (which are at a fixed time and date)
until we got a secretary devoted explicitly to that task.  Maybe more
teams should take up the meeting model; that way non-IRC folks can
either be on IRC for meeting times only, or peruse the meeting notes
afterwards if they are interested in what happened.

>
> I think that this would ultimately help make Gentoo development more visible
> and more accessible, ultimately leading to an increased conversion of users
> to contributors, if not users to devs.
>
> AllenJB
>
>