On Mar 14, 2007, at 1:51 PM, THOMAS, BRIAN M ((ATTSI)) wrote:
I haven't yet had a great reason to complain, but I can see the need emerging, as the community grows, for more narrowly targeted discussions.
Are you talking about xwiki-users or xwiki-dev? I'm also curious to list the domains of discussions that you think should get separated. FYI and FWIW the Maven community is about 1000 times larger than the XWiki one and they're still managing with a few mailing lists. I do agree that some modules in XWiki could get their mailing list when they grow but we're far, very very far from that, especially on the user list. I'd rather we focus all on reducing the questions asked on the list by improving xwiki.org
I have certainly bulk-marked threads on this list, and like Catalin I believed that forums offered the best opportunity for that (our XWiki host also hosts Roller and jForum), but given that tag-and-search offers potentially better targetting, it may be the better way.
One caveat on tagging, though: the effectiveness of such a scheme depends on user behavior, much more so when the community is relatively small (which XWiki's certainly is, compared to, say, del.icio.us).
Completely agree.
The genius of it lies in the fact that each user benefits most individually by the same behavior that benefits the community as a whole, which is tagging items meaningfully. Nevertheless, such an ad-hoc mechanism can be unsatisfactory if too few people "get it". Like hashing, it walks a fine line between high collision rates (too many matches) and excessive sparseness (too few). A more robust way of combining tags ('and'/'or'/'not') would benefit tagging almost as much as with search terms, although because tags are cheap and can be liberally applied, the current "require all" works pretty well where there is a large population of liberal taggers.
I do see, as the product and the community grow and mature, a growing distinction (witnessed recently) between "very advanced users/administrators/extenders" and the more casual user, and even finer distinctions within each of those groups. The difference is both qualitative and quantitative: obviously, for a successful project the growth of the population of casual users will quickly outpace and overwhelm that of advanced users, and self-help facilities will quickly be critical to success. The advanced users/admins/extenders will have more questions needing individual attention, and more likely to end up in JIRA.
Seggregation in general is bad as it doesn't lead to cross pollination. It should be avoided at all cost unless it's no more possible to avoid it.
One last thought: generally speaking, user fora and other self-help mechanisms do tend to grow of their own accord, so it's not necessarily a matter of major concern - if there's a big enough perceived need, someone will host it, whether anyone else wants them to or not, and the quality of the idea and the implementation will tend to attract those whose benefit it best serves.
Right.
Under that heading, I intend to investigate Nabble; it does sound interesting; sort of like subscribing to the mailing list with a shared GMail account, if I understand it correctly, no...?
-Vincent
-----Original Message----- From: Catalin Hritcu [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 3:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Do we need a forum?
Hi Vincent,
On 3/14/07, Connected Performance <[email protected]> wrote:
[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?
Catalin
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki- [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/ wws