Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

There have been a lot of changes going on around here. Lots of discussions, and lots of people missing them. Decisions are being made and this leaving some people feeling left out.

I understand that when meeting are held and people make decisions, they cannot wait around to get peoples input that did not bother to even come to the discussion's. The problem is, there are people willing to put in input, but feel lost as to how to do it. We seem to end up late to the show, and you guys are like we started watching that movie 15 minutes ago, what do you mean you want to watch another movie? Sorry, that ship sailed....

There is 5 mailing groups

Council Blogs

Council Wiki

Maemo Community

News

Announcements

Garage News

Contribute

Talk.Maemo.org Forum

Did I miss any others?


I would like to request a single resource, that will be responsible for soliciting community input. If you want to know what we think, we want to tell you. The best way to do this is to have a single webpage or mailing list that will tell me when you want to know what I think.

Consistency in notifications
Consistency in response requests (polls, IRC townhall meetings, active thread discussions?)

I don't have an answer, I only post to you my problem as I see it.

I ask this poll question?

Should there be a single site/location that will let you know whenever a community input is requested?

I personally think this will go a long way into turning this into a real community, where everyone feels like their opinion counts.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

This is a good thread.

One of the main problems right now is the preference of the different groups. Developers tend to like mailing-lists as they can respond via email. End-users on the other hand, prefer forums.

If you ask me, unless private, all discussions should be made in the forums.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

general word of mouth in irc is a very powerful mechanism for information.

I dont really care how many places there are as long as people speak up about them happening.
the more we talk, the closer we become.

#maemo has been a bit quiet of late.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

#1:
I doubt we'll have the perfect solution until we close down all channels but one. Kill IRC, stop the mailing lists, ... until we have one thread in one forum. If you don't like that (I don't), we'll have to live with the fact that people talk about issues in different places.

#2:
Thank you, penguinbait, for pointing out how many places there actually are. I keep going here, going there, and I just assumed everybody would eventually get to know everything - at least everything that's important. Now I'm no longer sure.

#3:
I think the community council is doing a pretty good job ATM pointing out whenever our input is really important and keeping us up to date with the big changes:
http://maemo.org/community/council/

It just gets lost in the noise on the news page and on the planet. If articles from this source would stay on top of the news at the front page (http://maemo.org/) for, say, a week or two, with an icon similar to what's used for the "get involved" link, would this solve the problem?
As an addition, the most recent news from this source should maybe replace the current wiki-headlines on http://maemo.org/community/.

One could also indicate on http://maemo.org/community/ that people who want this kind of community information should subscribe to the council's RSS feed. (And, of course, once these mechanisms are established, the council needs to take extra care not to miss a topic. But from what I see, they covered everything relevant so far.)

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

@penguinbait, note that in the title you ask about "being informed" but then the poll is about requiring "community input". They overlap but are not the same. Being informed of everything is time consuming, but it should be more doable being aware of the topics where your input is formally requested.

I think the basic unit of discussion about community topics should be this maemo.org forum at talk.maemo.org.

The community council blog should be enough to highlight whethever interesting discussions in this maemo.org forum want more awareness, feedback or votes.

The maemo.org announcements should be enough to highlight the deepest topics requiring a community-wide decision. Optionally an email to everybody can be sent for crucial topics.

Doesn't sound that complicated to follow, if a community member wants to follow.

Then there are plenty more places where discussions happen and decisions are made, but I think the own place or topics defines the audience, and that is fine. For instance the maemo-developers list or bugs.maemo.org or #maemo.

The maemo-community list sounds like redundant now. Most of the people active there are active here. We clould consider closing it and we would have one redundant channel less.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I voted that there should be a one stop shopping site for community information. Perhaps in the "Announcements" section of the forums. Looking there, the 2nd most recent thread had a last post date of Dec-14-08.

As much as some will hate to have any kind of discussion on the forums, I think it is the best place for it to reach the most people. Just checking there are over 22,000 people registered on the forums. Even if you figure only half are active, that's still a lot of people. Probably many more that on any mailing list or irc channel. Probably more than read any blogs or visit other pages.

I participate in other forums where the administrators can force you to view a particular thread before continuing into the forum. Could that be an option to highlight particular topics for the community?

Obviously, we aren't looking to be informed of everything going on. But *ANY* topics that can affect the community should be discussed in the forums *in detail*, not discussed elsewhere first, then brought to the forums once the groundwork has already been laid.

For instance, I would have loved to vote in the last council election, but it wasn't clear to me the multiple steps that needed to be taken to be eligible to vote. I believe that I would have had enough karma. I saw a thread on the upcoming elections, even found a maemo.org page with some nominations. I read that an email would be sent with further instructions for voting. I didn't read anywhere that I needed to 1) register with maemo.org (I thought "community" would include ITT), 2) create a link in my maemo.org profile to my ITT user profile web address (as opposed to my user name) 3) wait a day or two for my karma to be calculated.

I suppose I should have spent several hours googling on what I needed to do, and what the requirements were before I would be allowed to vote. Instead, I stupidly mis-read the information I did find, and assumed that voting for a "community" council would be easier and involve more of the community they purport to represent.

Of course a single thread detailing the required steps in the forum would have given far more people access to voting and likely resulted in far more than 160 votes. Just my 2 cents.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Penguinbait: I agreed with you in March, already.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I believe there is a communication problem. I have put forth my poll. When I tried to put in the poll question in the Title, it would not fit. Perhaps I should file a bug, but that is another topic.

I think the poll question on the topic are fine, but thats really irrelevant.

I NEVER ASKED ANYONE TO CLOSE ANYTHING, NOR DO I SUPPORT THAT.

The community has lots of places to go and explore, fine. Topics are discussed in several places, fine. NOBODY wants to change that.

What I am requesting, it a single location to INFORM THE COMMUNITY when, community input is requested.

If its a topic that involves the whole community, then I want you to SAY, HEY COMMUNITY, COME GIVE US YOUR INPUT. LOUDLY

I am not saying to do this for ever topic, I am not saying everything that is done has to be put to a vote. However from my understanding, the new theme was voted upon? I am not sure I was not informed there was a vote? I hear there was a discussion and vote to remove the sub-forums under alternatives.

When people "complained" about the changes made ,they were told there were many discussions, why didn't they participate.

IT IS CLEAR, THAT IT IS NOT CLEAR TO ALL

So I am asking, I want my advocates "Maemo Community Council" to promote important issues up to the community for discussion in a consistent manner in a consistent location.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I've already voiced my concerns in one of the Theme-change threads. (I was addressing community council member timsamoff).

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

There was a proposal made on 2009-03-10 that was discussed through a week and about 50 posts before Reggie executed the changes.

You might argue that was a short period of time. Fair enough. On the othr hand if you follow the posters and the thanks you see that most of the usual suspects had a say, so it looked like having reached a critical mass for a change.

No votes, but no huge discussion either. There were many opinions and the original proposal evolved to integrate them.

I notice this is the opposite approach you have: throw a poll first and discuss after. Well, in my experience discussion helps to reach consensus while polls tend to stress divisions and polarize the debate. This is why I think voting is a last resort for making community decisions, not the first one.

It's like in this poll. You say "I don't have an answer, I only post to you my problem as I see it." but in fact you do have an answer and quite clear. The poll is a means for you to know how much support you get for that answer: "I want my advocates "Maemo Community Council" to promote important issues up to the community for discussion in a consistent manner in a consistent location." (2h after opening the poll)

You could have started with the proposal you actually have in mind asking for feedback to contest it or improve it.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Most is really not enough, however. I'm against this proposal, personally.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Look I am not trying to force anything on anyone. I say I have no solution. I see a problem. I think we need a mechanism to help keep people involved who maybe have things going on in their life, and if they go see hey, we are talking about a change they might have time to read that thread. If they have to search all of ITT and read the entire thread to find out what is going on, less people will be involved in making the decisions, and changes will continue top upset users.

Yes I ran a poll, if people don't agree with me, that must mean they are keeping informed and not confused. If they do agree with me, this must mean that people are confused about where exactly they should be looking.

Yes, I said I want my advocates to support this, why is that a bad thing? The council represents the community, so in my mind it was a no brainer. The council votes on what needs full community input and promotes this forward as a larger more visible topic.

:confused::confused::confused:

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

They could always be, you know, invited here.

I could have predicted that.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Most of these items are usually summed up in some way (if not in the form of actual aggregated posts) at http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/ .

That aside, I'm all for extirpating some of the mailing lists (or all of them) now that talk.maemo.org exists. This is a completely applicable...er...forum for that sort of discussion to occur.

Tim

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

It's not a matter of awareness. :) Some people really don't like forums.

I'm sure you could, but I'm also sure you haven't the slightest inkling of why.

The solution here is the mailing list integration into vBulletin, not the closing of a list and the certain loss of several important members.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I don't mind using the forum, I just think then there should be a sub-forum that topics are only startable by Maemo Council or Maemo proper or Reggie or Quim or whoever should be on that list.

Not sure if this is even possible? I just don't want stuff to be all over the place, unless there is a central location to tell you where that is.

Although perhaps a sub-forum where anyone can open threads, but all the "active topics" are sticky set by council/reggie/quim/mods ?

Again I said I don't have any answers I am stuck on, I am just throwing out Ideas

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Is there something wrong with http://maemo.org/community/council/ ?

Just wondering. Do these items need to be here instead of there? If so, that's fine, but I'd like some sort of justifiable reason.

Tim

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I think GA put it best:
I think *most* read the forums and *less than most* read the other multiple sources. Why not aggregate that information in the forums and get *more than most* readership. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two to copy and paste text into a new thread, or provide a link and a quick synopsis.

and some really don't like mailing lists, irc, blogs, etc :) You name it and I'm sure you can find someone who hates it.

correct, bearing in mind that ignoring pleas for better communication (or other issues) would lead to the certian loss of other important members.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I'm with GA here. I really don't get all this talk of closing down this or that channel to keep only one's preferred medium. What happened to syndication ? That's what the Internet (not just the Web) is for, and I see it happen everywhere.

Granted, I'm not into IRC at all, I spend the bulk of my maemo community time on ItT out of habit, and do a mediocre job of keeping in touch with the rest of maemo.org and its multiple blogs, mailing lists & such. That doesn't mean others should be just like me, and those other channels should be shut down.

What if, for example, each time a new post is made on the maemo community council blog, a new topic was created (automatically, not manually when Quim or Tim or someone thinks to do it) in the relevant section on ItT, and said blog had comments disabled to the benefit of redirecting discussion about that post to said topic ?

It would be enough to alert me when something important is brewing that I'd have missed otherwise (like redesigning the forum theme :-),

It would make me more likely to participate,

It would concentrate more community input on a medium that's designed for discussions instead of a galaxy of so-so blog commenting systems, making it more easily searchable,

It would would draw more people living on other levels to the forum, and more people living in the forum to the rest of maemo.org, which I believe was the original goal.

Of course, for this to really work we'd really need to have SSO enable throughout the entire maemo.org space :-)

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Look the point of the thread is to get people to discuss and hopefully agree on a single location where this information will live, and this information is distributed to the community.

Where and in what medium is less important to me than who is reponsible for determining what is defined as needing community input. And that it executed in a consistent documented manner.

It seems to me that community council is best informed and able to determine if some topic should be raised to a more visible spot. Especially since they are charged with being an advocate for thed community.

I don't think these topics should be mixed with blogs or other information, this should be clear to any user visiting that these are topics the community wants input on.

webpage, email, forum, all fine by me, lets just pick one

To be clear, this is not a request to close or stop any current medium. Its an attempt to filter community specific information into a single location to avoid problems that have been happening here recently, or at least problems perceived by some.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I'm fine with posting here and not on the blog... I just need people to say so. Which, it seems, people are doing.

Having mailing list posts come here is ok by me too (we're already doing it here thanks to Valério Valério).

So, let me try to get a consensus from the Council.

Tim

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I don't have a strong preference on this, just a slight bias towards the council blog as is.

reasons:
a) it's more official and better integrated in the overall news structure (read: planet, news...), wheras the forums "feel" more like a place for casual small talk.
b) if I'm not missing anything right now (i tried and checked these pages again before i wrote this), you'd have to create a new section "Council news" to get an RSS-feed. Just posting to any existing section (like "maemo.org") wouldn't do.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Because then discussion takes place in two separate locations, which makes it really hard to come to a reasonable consensus.

Which is all the more reason not to kill existing discussion areas.

This is a hardly a clear-cut issue. In fact, it's highly polarized, entrenched and subjective.

There are plans to integrate the mailing lists into vBulletin in the near future (much like Gossamer Threads), this should satisfy everybody involved.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

... and then there are things like email-vbulletin integration with to look at, even if I also agree it's not a priority now.

On the topic of concentrating relevant news around the council blog, I think not only the council members but also all of us active in this thread could spend a little less time replying posts and a little more time cultivating our collaboration channels for others to find more answers better.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Don't give yourself a hard time. This falls under the "you can't know what you don't know that you don't know" umbrella. :D

Your point is valid, and hopefully by next election community integration will be to the point that this confusion won't arise again.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Thanks. I will research this if it can bes supported. It looks like there might be a problem supporting vB 3.8.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I think what we need is a gopher server ;)

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

GA, what do you prefer? Your first post seems to indicate being in favor of getting more people involved by keeping the mailing list in addition to having the information in the forums. Your second post seems to be against having the discussion in two places. I'm confused as to what you are trying to say???

I agree, I think the only person to suggest that has been qgil as quoted above.

Agreed, I just wanted to point out that if we are discussing improving community communication (and potentially losing important members) we should be sure to try to alienate as few people as possible :)

PS Boy I wish quoting a post would include the previous posts. It'd make keeping track of a conversation easier.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

What I'm saying is that holding two discussions on one issue in two separate locations is undesirable, which is a separate issue from having two possible areas to discuss things and addresses the proposals to "cross-post" stuff between the lists and the forums.

A technical solution is really the best one to this problem.

Which is why I like the idea of integrating the lists into vBulletin. People can browse however they prefer.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

I agree. It is a lot of work to go back and harvest the quotes from previous posts to build a new post.

However I had trouble reading the nested quotes. I think it would be easier to post them sequentially. You know, something like:

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

qole

I agree, that is what I should have done, just didn't think about it. I've seen them nested on other forums and went that way with it.

Thanks for nicely pointing out a better option.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

One single point to stay informed about all the maemo.org development are the sprint wiki pages.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_Sprints/April_09 summarizes all the activity that was committed for the April sprint and the progress done. From that single page you can find the links to the places where those tasks are documented and also to the current backlog and new proposals.

If you want to help out, influence the prioritization of tasks or push a task yourself, this is the place to go.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Also note that http://wiki.maemo.org allows you to watch specific pages and even get emails every time a change has been made. So you can get in your mailbox all the progress done in maemo.org development, commit by commit.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

So if I monitor the sprint pages all future request for community input will be organized through there. So, I can just check there as the main place council will request community input?

I guess if thats the page, I just fon't want to keep having the same discussions about who didn't know what when???

So council and community has decided??

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Has council decided to use the sprint pages for this? Did council discuss this?

I am a little hesitant to use the sprint because it's not got a lot of visibility. However if this is where we must check for the information then I guess you can promote people to go there?

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

There should be several single points of contact. In that when you are looking for input, you should look for input from the relevant groups, but at a single point in each of those groups.

If you want end user input then you are silly to not post such in the announcement section here. If you want developer input then you should also contact the mailing list people (or irc or wherever they gather). I only visit here so I'm not sure what the makeup of the other mediums are.

I hope this makes sense, maybe I should have marked 'Don't care'. If I'm left to feel abandoned then that's the way my feelings will drift.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

No, regular Council correspondence won't occur on the Sprint pages... Although, we do try to communicate Sprint tasks that we feel are of greater community value. (Believe it or not, not everyone wants to know everything that's going on behind the scenes.)

I still think that this forum (or the Council blog) is the place to do this. No, I haven't had time to retrieve a consensus yet.

Tim

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Thanks Tim, I can see from attending your sprint meeting you are all busy.

I understand that not every piece of information needs to be sent out for notification. I am looking for these hot topics, like forum colors, or removing sub-forums, these are greater issues that effect the entire community. I guess I just feel like, that council can recognize these possible hot topics and move them to a more visible location where the larger community has visibility to discuss them openly and provide their input.

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

Too true.

Tim

Re: Poll: How can i stay informed? Please Vote
 

A single central place asking for community input is a grand idea. But your specific point rapidly brings us to the nub of the problem: in this central place, do we highlight issues over Bugzilla numbering, labelling of people in Bugzilla, link colours on maemo.org, topics for the next sprint meeting, debmaster priorities, sub-fora in tmo, locations for the next summit, details of the SSO integration task, the sprint meeting process itself, what should be included in the community SSU, ...?

It gets noisy quick. What's relevant to one portion of the community - the structure of talk.maemo.org's sub-forums in the "Alternatives" section - is not relevant to the maemo.org staff working on all our behalf, or a developer working on the next cutting edge Maemo 5 application.

So it starts making sense to ask the big questions in one place (or at least point to the places where they are being asked), and have the more specific questions asked in the most relevant place (for the sub-fora of "Alternatives" that was in the meta-forum here; although it probably should also have been cross-posted in to those fora affected as well - I don't know if it was). But then, closing some of the sub-fora hasn't caused any ruckus, who's to know ahead of time?

The topics which do affect the whole community are few and far between. They do get posted loudly on the council blog, examples:

• "Maemo School" tutorial proposal needs volunteers
• New maemo.org soon to launch!
• April 2009 sprint meeting
• Maemo Community Council election results
• Maemo Community Council: have you voted yet?
• Council voting rights: time to act!
• Maemo Summit 2009...
• ...

"Not every topic" - but who decides? Obviously, you're not happy with the decisions made so far, but at least recognise that people are trying to do what you want, and come up with better suggestions on guidelines/rules of thumb.

Not voted, no. Discussed. To a consensus. On the mailing list for community issues for Maemo. There is a central place to discuss things about the look & feel of maemo.org, voting for the council elections and it was maemo-community. That you wanted to be actively involved but didn't want to subscribe is unfortunate; and there's obviously a desire to increase participation.

What we deem is important is put on the council blog. Personally, I don't think the organisation of the sub-fora of "Alternatives" counts as important enough to warrant a message to the whole community, when there are mechanisms within the affected community to discuss it; you disagree.

Suggestions for things which are ongoing, but may have been overlooked are always welcome to any council member (email, IRC, Twitter, PM), maemo-community, or even council@maemo.org if you can't find another way of getting in touch.