14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
9:06 p.m.
On Mar 14, 2007, at 5:21 PM, Uwe CP wrote:
Vincent et.al.,
Here are my questions after having read the responses so far:
- I didn't know about Nabble, I like it much better, it allows me
to focus
on the subjects I am interested in. But it only takes me from a
flat list of
EMAILS to a flat list of SUBJECTS. As soon as the community grows
and the #
of subjects with it, you have the same problem as before, but lets
wait
until more people suffer from information overload and hopefully we
find out
before they unsubscribe.
- I realized that different people have different ways of
communication and
preferences in how to categorize topics (I prefer categories, you
prefer a
good searching machine). Let me state the difficulties I
encountered, when I
started using XWiki, maybe that sheds some light on what I am
looking for:
First of all I am using XWiki on your farm. I initially thought the
xwiki-'users' in the mailing list are of the same kind until I
realized that
the overwhelming majority of posts where not about how to use
xwiki, it was
about how to make it work properly so others can use it. I wasn't
looking
for solutions of how to upgrade from beta2 to 3 without problems, I
was
looking for 'how to use Xwiki'. I found the FAQ, but some links in
there
didn't work and some entries seemed to be outdated, since XWiki didn't
behave as described. So I did some trial and error stuff myself, some
successfully some not.
I think this is mostly because:
1) XWiki is still pretty rough on some domains for end users and thus
it currently attracts technology-savvy users
2) End users who use XWiki in production pay for consulting/project
development/expertise and they don't use the user mailing list at all
3) XWiki is not your traditional wiki. It's a platform for building
small web applications and thus lots of "user" questions are
"advanced". Actually once you realize the power of XWiki users
typically want to change stuff that comes in the default wiki and
thus ask questions about this.
4) the documentation on xwiki.org is improving but there's still a
lot to cover and people ask question but a very little percentage
make the effort of taking that information and putting it in a nice
formatted way on xwiki.org.
So I am looking for recommendation, so I can work effectively:
- Become a SW expert in how the guts of the XWIki work?
- Find a XWIKI expert and pay him/her?
- Stay on the users list and ignore all the developer topics there
and hope
enough people have similar problems?
- Wait some more months until more more users like me are part of the
mailing list?
Here's my POV:
- XWiki is an open source project. Any user using xwiki.org and the
mailing list is someone who's interested in using XWiki for free and
as such agrees to spend some time (and thus money) to learn it, wade
through the list, etc. I personally think that the support everyone
gets on the list for free is extremely good, even compared to some
commercial products that I won't name :-)
- Pure "Business" users of XWiki who do not want or do not have the
time to do it themselves (or who want expertise/new features/etc) pay
someone to do it for them. Today, this is the business model of
XPertNet the company who started XWiki and who's paying some
developers to work on XWiki (like me for example).
WDYT?
Thanks
-Vincent
vmassol wrote:
On Mar 14, 2007, at 9:37 AM, Catalin Hritcu wrote:
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Do-we-need-a-
forum--tf3399333.html#a9478008
Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki-
users(a)objectweb.org mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:xwiki-users-unsubscribe@objectweb.org
For general help: mailto:sympa@objectweb.org?subject=help
ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/
wws Hi Vincent,
On 3/14/07, Connected Performance <Uwe(a)connectedperformance.com>
wrote:
I think the same as Google thinks. Good search tool works quite
nicely... :)
I also think that anything of value from the mailing list should be
moved to xwiki.org, jira, etc. so that it can be retrieved easily and
in a formatted mode in the future. So if a user asks we redirect him
to the page on xwiki.org and tell him kindly to RTM ;-)
Last, Nabble offers RSS feeds for our mailing lists so one idea could
be to use our GWT Collaborative Watch tool online on xwiki.org and
let users tag threads. For those who don't know what this is, it's a
collaborative RSS aggregator that allows collaborative tagging. Users
can add feeds, tag posts, etc. This is some internal project right
now but we could possibly showcase it on xwiki.org.
Honestly, I don't think this will work in our case at hand (because
it requires people to go to the information rather than the
information coming to them and thus it takes too long to perform a
single tag operation) but this is a really cool tool so we could
showcase it in this manner and I would love to be proved wrong :-)
Thanks
-Vincent
--
You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki-
users(a)objectweb.org
mailing list.
To unsubscribe: mailto:xwiki-users-unsubscribe@objectweb.org
For general help: mailto:sympa@objectweb.org?subject=help
ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://
www.objectweb.org/wws
[snip]
Forums have two more advantages:
- What to communicate: Categories/topics ( i.e.'hosting xwiki','
data base
topics', 'tutorials' etc, you'll get the point) enable
specialization, which
increases the effectiveness of developers and users (BTW: I am
mostly a user
of xwiki)
[snip]
This is actually a good point we should probably consider. We hardly
have any categorization with the mailing lists other then the split
between users and developers. Both are high traffic, and while
you, or
Sergiu, are probably reading everything, you cannot expect your
users
to do the same.
So don't you think that better categorization would help? Would
it be
possible to have it with the current infrastructure (e.g. we
could for
example tag posts, like we do for [Proposal] etc.) ? WDYT?