Markos Chandras wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 March 2009 14:15:36 Thilo Bangert wrote:
>>> Bugs aren't a good way to keep in touch with developers, that's what
>>> irc is for.
>> while i dont necessarily think, that bugzi is the best way to stay in
>> contact with me, it surely is a better way than IRC - on which i am close
>> to never.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> kind regards
>> Thilo
> 
> 	To be honest , I don't agree with that. Being around on irc is quite helpful 
> to get direct feedback from users and fix bugs before they hit  more users. 
> This is a good way to reduce the amount of bugs that hit bugzilla. 

While IRC is undoubtedly a useful communication medium, it is pretty 
much a "here and now" thing. I believe that Gentoo would benefit quite a 
lot if teams started using more permanent forms of communication such as 
blogs, wikis or websites. Not only would this allow the current set of 
developers within a team to know what one another are up to and what 
needs to be done, but it would also allow those who are not so 
intimately involved (both other devs, contributors and users) to keep up 
to date and contribute as well as leaving something for future 
developers to be able to look back on and see what options / 
improvements / etc were considered / done in the past.

I recently wrote a blog post that went somewhat along these lines:
http://allenjb.me.uk/blog/why-only-think-about-projects-for-gsoc

As someone who's very interested in getting involved in Gentoo 
Development, I often find it hard to gather information on what projects 
/ people are up to, what's currently going on and what the plans for the 
future are.


AllenJB