Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Plan, then communicate (no-list)

[George Prowse]

Alec Warner wrote:
> The community currently has no good means to rank problems in the view
> of users other than the forums; which currently have their own issues.

Have you thought about the use of some other forum, a web page for
example where you specifically as for user interaction, one with
questions, answer boxes and tick boxes. The page and subject could be
announced on all the current media (forums, lists, irc) and answers
could be automatically converted into percentages for the thought of the
community as a whole.
>
> User Coverage: Not everyone has a forums account.  Not everyone uses
> their forums account.  We have no idea how many users we have
> (ancidotal numbers suggest ~200000; see
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~antarus/bouncer-stats.txt).  It is difficult to
> know what percentage of users responded and thus becomes difficult to
> judge how important something is (we have only the respondants data to
> use).
>
> Arguably you could say that anyone who didn't vote doesn't care; but
> you have to factor in people who didn't learn of the vote during the
> voting period.
>
> User Education: This is that whole Cathedral thing.  Below I'll talk
> about Daniel's goal of maximizing developer impact and this plays a
> big part.  Many developers don't talk to users because its draining
> and they want to work on projects that they have a high impact on.  I
> could sit in #gentoo and field questions all day (I've done it before)
> but I have things I could spend my time on that are more worthwhile to
> the project (and we are lucky enough to have a crack team of awesome
> contributors that staff that channel).

Maybe communication and people skills should be part of the job
description (language permitting of course)? If not then there should be
developers whose job it is to relay the comments of those who do not or
cannot want to communicate.
>
> Talking to users is exhausting when the user really has a
> misconception about a given problem, program, or feature.  It takes
> time to educate people why something works the day it does and
> documentation only helps so much.  Give bad service and the user is
> off to the forums to complain about how he was mistreated by that
> Antarus guy on #gentoo-portage and how much Gentoo sucks.

Here is where the forums could help out, if a question or rfc was put
into a thread then any questions about the question could be answered by
those users in the know.
>
> User Validation: Most systems that users can use to respond on a large
> scale don't have a means to validate whether they use your software or
> not.  This is more of a trend game; needing to look at the aftermath
> of any given aggregate data and look for areas where people may have
> given feedback that we should throw out (like automated voting).  I
> don't think this problem is necessarily solvable or that big a deal
> but it is something to consider/

Ask for a uname -a (not useful for me at the moment because I am stuck
on windows) or something that might give you a more precise answer like
requesting users set up an account (which could also give you more
useful information like platform, stable/unstable and demographics.
>
>>      Drobbins has addressed (a) and (b) and (c).  My suggestion is
>> that the-powers-that-be at Gentoo address them also, starting with
>> (a) and produce, hopefully, a far better plan.
>
> Drobbins has addressed very little in my eyes.  Sure we have
> communication problems (pr was basically dead until this incident) and
> we have leadership issues.  His plan is not well specified:
>
> 1.  Open the lines of communication.  How?  We have an influx of
> people interested in helping out with GMN and PR which is good.  We
> have a new PR lead.  I'm busy working on news items and learning XSL
> to try and change the webpages a bit.  The foundation obviously failed
> at providing data in the past and I hope to change that.  We have
> tried to be as transparent as possible with posts to -nfp, posts to
> -project, news items on the website, etc.
>
> Are there other places where communication is lacking?  What kind of
> information are the users looking for?

Transparency is great and some of the comments from the short-lived
userreps project was that most things seemed to be done in private, the
first any of the users knew about anything was an announcement.

Attitude is another. For instance, I made a comment on -dev (I think)
that without users Gentoo would be nothing and the response I got was
basically "p**s off, we develop because we want to".
>
> 2.  Maximize developer impact per unit time.  How?
> I'm uncertain where Daniel thinks developers are wasting time stuck in
> process.  We could kill the 30 day stability guideline in an attempt
> to get packages into stable quicker; but I'm unsure what that would do
> to overall quality (which a subset of the userbase seems to think is
> subpar at this time).  I'm also unsure how much time it costs someone
> to become a fully-fledged developer; however I think we have a decent
> set of options for individuals who wish to contribute without being a
> full-time developer (sunrise, proxy-maint, arch tester, overlays).

Killing the 30 guideline would be a big mistake IMO. Quality is far more
important.

As for developers, Gentoo continually says it is under-staffed and one
of the things I suggested when userrel started up was a developer
fast-track, where current and former developers of other projects could
demonstrate they had the skills and could be moved into their areas of
expertise far quicker.
>
> Are there specific processes we have that you think hold developers back?

Yes, the continual arguments over GLEPs. PMS is a good example - people
trying to add their political piece of the puzzle in and everyone
disagreeing.

I honestly believe that when you have something as serious as a PMS then
the constant bickering and the camps at gentoo have rendered it too
incompetent to get it done itself, you need outside assistance who can
listen to the arguments and make a decision. It would be great if an
agreement could be struck up with another distro where assistance was
given both ways. A request for discussion about the viability would only
take an email to someone like Mark Shuttleworth and what do you have to
lose? The worst that could happen is that someone says "we dont have the
time, sorry"

George

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