Do we need a forum?
Hi, We're currently using mailing lists and IRC (and person2person chats) for answering user questions. But: - IRC has no history (yet; when's that bot coming online?) - mailing lists are not that easy to browse and search. Should we make a forum for users? Pro - One place where users can find information, organized by topics - Users are used to posting on forums, and we might get a larger community Con - Soon it will get too crowded, and (some) developers won't have the time to answer all the emails; we need a strong community, and advanced users knowing the code, and for this we need documentation As a developer, I'd stick to mailing lists. As a user, I'd say forum. What's your opinion? -- http://purl.org/net/sergiu
Sergiu et. al. thanks for introducing the notion of users and developers, how about administrators and web-designers? Are those roles done by one person currently? 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) - How and when to communicate: You are not forced to read all entries in a forum assumed it is organized in categories mentioned above. You'd pick the categories of interest and subscribe and contribute to those. Users and developers will have more time to focus on their task at hand. A minor burden of a forum IMHO is the need for a moderator (maybe even per category), in order to keep it organized. I'd volunteer to be the one for the user (not developer) community. BTW: XWIKI is a collaboration space, isn't it? But the user communication is done through emails? Sounds strange. Uwe On 3/13/07, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
We're currently using mailing lists and IRC (and person2person chats) for answering user questions. But: - IRC has no history (yet; when's that bot coming online?) - mailing lists are not that easy to browse and search.
Should we make a forum for users?
Pro - One place where users can find information, organized by topics - Users are used to posting on forums, and we might get a larger community Con - Soon it will get too crowded, and (some) developers won't have the time to answer all the emails; we need a strong community, and advanced users knowing the code, and for this we need documentation
As a developer, I'd stick to mailing lists. As a user, I'd say forum.
What's your opinion?
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-- Uwe Kleinschmidt CEO Connected Performance phone +1805-456-6513 [email protected]
Hi Uwe, On Mar 14, 2007, at 1:31 AM, Connected Performance wrote:
[snip]
BTW: XWIKI is a collaboration space, isn't it? But the user communication is done through emails? Sounds strange.
Here's what we currently do: - Discussions are done through emails and IRC because they need liveness - When consensus is reached it's either: - Added to JIRA - Added to our Wiki on xwiki.org What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do differently? Thanks -Vincent
On Mar 14, 2007, at 8:22 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Uwe,
On Mar 14, 2007, at 1:31 AM, Connected Performance wrote:
[snip]
BTW: XWIKI is a collaboration space, isn't it? But the user communication is done through emails? Sounds strange.
Here's what we currently do:
- Discussions are done through emails and IRC because they need liveness - When consensus is reached it's either: - Added to JIRA - Added to our Wiki on xwiki.org
What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do differently?
BTW thinking about this it's true that we take the result to jira or the wiki but there's one category that we don't summarize: things that haven't lead anywhere. For example, take this forum idea which we are debating. Imagine that we don't go forward with it. I think it would still be useful to keep a trace of that on xwiki.org. Something like "Things we've discussed but decided not to go forward with". So when someone asks or raises again the idea we could point them to that place. It would also serve as documentation so that any new comer will not be tempted to raise again some topic (unless he's read the old threads and decided he's something new to bring to the table). I believe this is what is advocated in http://video.google.nl/ videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645 (How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). It's not easy to do and requires conscious thoughts but it's an idea to get the maximum value out of any discussion. We spend energy and time discussing something so it would be good that this energy be useful to a maximum extent. This could make it a little bit more useful. Thanks -Vincent
Hi Vincent, I would have also voted for the forum, I thought it would be really useful. But now that you tell us about Nabble, sure it has he best of both a forum and a mailing list. But why didn't we know about Nabble before asking for a forum ? vmassol wrote:
[snip]
What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do differently?
In order for a forum to be of any use, developers and users should know about it. It should be linked more prominently from xwiki.org. Now I don't even know if there is any link, and this is bad. Catalin -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Do-we-need-a-forum--tf3399333.html#a9469881 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
I know about Nabble, yet I don't think it is as powerful as a forum. One thing about mailing lists is that you need to subscribe to post a message and receive the answers. I know that you can unsubscribe at any moment, but you still get a lot of other messages along with what you're interested in. Another thing is that if we host a forum, we know how long it will be there. If we use mail, it will be in our account, and for the moment on some servers, like Nabble. But we don't know for sure how long it will be there, and how long it will display the xwiki mailing list. Again, personally I prefer mails, but we should listen to the users' voice. On 3/14/07, hritcu <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I would have also voted for the forum, I thought it would be really useful. But now that you tell us about Nabble, sure it has he best of both a forum and a mailing list. But why didn't we know about Nabble before asking for a forum ?
vmassol wrote:
[snip]
What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do differently?
In order for a forum to be of any use, developers and users should know about it. It should be linked more prominently from xwiki.org. Now I don't even know if there is any link, and this is bad.
Catalin
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Do-we-need-a-forum--tf3399333.html#a9469881 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Morning Sergiu, On 3/14/07, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
I know about Nabble, yet I don't think it is as powerful as a forum.
One thing about mailing lists is that you need to subscribe to post a message and receive the answers. I know that you can unsubscribe at any moment, but you still get a lot of other messages along with what you're interested in.
[snip]
The thing is that you can do exactly this with Nabble, browse existing messages without registering to Nabble. And if you want to post you register to Nabble (just did it), which does NOT mean you are registered to the mailing list. You can watch only particular topics, exactly like with a forum. Catalin
On Mar 14, 2007, at 9:09 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
I know about Nabble, yet I don't think it is as powerful as a forum.
One thing about mailing lists is that you need to subscribe to post a message and receive the answers. I know that you can unsubscribe at any moment, but you still get a lot of other messages along with what you're interested in.
As I said in my previous email you can do the same with Nabble but I don't like it (see http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/ MailingLists at the bottom). I think it's a small price to pay for getting a good free software ;) But again it's possible and it's being used.
Another thing is that if we host a forum, we know how long it will be there. If we use mail, it will be in our account, and for the moment on some servers, like Nabble. But we don't know for sure how long it will be there, and how long it will display the xwiki mailing list.
I don't quite agree. What if ObjectWeb goes away? We won't have any SVN anymore? What if our hosting company goes away? We won't have any farm anymore or any jira, etc. The best we can do is duplication. Today our lists are backed up on at least 3 locations: - OW - Nabble - Gmane I think we're pretty safe :-)
Again, personally I prefer mails, but we should listen to the users' voice.
I haven't heard any complaint of users about this (especially about users knowing about Nabble). Can you point me to someone who's complained and to whom we've said they could use Nabble and then they said that it wasn't good enough? :) BTW one person isn't enough; we need several before deciding that it's something we need to address. BTW you may not have noticed but a lot of our users are already posting from Nabble (you can notice as Nabble inserts some text at the bottom of emails). Thanks -Vincent
On 3/14/07, hritcu < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I would have also voted for the forum, I thought it would be really useful. But now that you tell us about Nabble, sure it has he best of both a forum and a mailing list. But why didn't we know about Nabble before asking for a forum ?
vmassol wrote:
[snip]
What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do
differently?
In order for a forum to be of any use, developers and users should know about it. It should be linked more prominently from xwiki.org. Now I don't even know if there is any link, and this is bad.
Catalin
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Do-we-need-a- forum--tf3399333.html#a9469881 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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Hi Catalin, On Mar 14, 2007, at 8:57 AM, hritcu wrote:
Hi Vincent,
I would have also voted for the forum, I thought it would be really useful. But now that you tell us about Nabble, sure it has he best of both a forum and a mailing list. But why didn't we know about Nabble before asking for a forum ?
Yes you're right, I've just added it to Mailing Lists page: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists Note the info box that I've put at the end (which summarizes one of the things I don't like with forums). BTW there are a lot of sites like Nabble that we may not know about. I didn't know that we were registered on Nabble either, I just checked and was happy to see it was subscribed to the XWiki mailing list. The same could apply to: - mail-archive.com. Checking... No it's not subscribed. - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/ ? Checking... No we're not subscribed. - gmane. Checking... Yes we're subscribed: http://gmane.org/find.php? list=xwiki Basically all it needs is that someone subscribes the mail address of these tools to the xwiki mailing lists for XWiki to get archived there. Thanks -Vincent
vmassol wrote:
[snip]
What is wrong with that and what would you suggest to do differently?
In order for a forum to be of any use, developers and users should know about it. It should be linked more prominently from xwiki.org. Now I don't even know if there is any link, and this is bad.
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
On Mar 14, 2007, at 9:37 AM, Catalin Hritcu wrote:
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?
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
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. 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? thanks in advance UWe vmassol wrote:
On Mar 14, 2007, at 9:37 AM, Catalin Hritcu wrote:
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?
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 [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
-- 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.
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:
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?
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
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Vincent, Your points are understood. My intention though was to try XWIKI BEFORE I make a business decision. My assumption was also that the community might be interested in users like me, who help improve usability by raising and help solving issues. According to your statements this seems to be reserved for technology savvy developers. O.K. I live with what I've got. Thanks Uwe vmassol wrote:
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:
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?
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- [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
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On Mar 14, 2007, at 10:17 PM, Uwe CP wrote:
Vincent,
Your points are understood. My intention though was to try XWIKI BEFORE I make a business decision. My assumption was also that the community might be interested in users like me, who help improve usability by raising and help solving issues. According to your statements this seems to be reserved for technology savvy developers.
No, not at all... Nothing is reserved to anyone. This is open source and nobody is dictating who posts on which lists. This is not something we want and we do have all sort of users. It's just that it happens that there are technological users in there and I was trying to rationalize this and find out why this is so. I never intended to say the list is reserved to one category of people only. It seems like I did not understand (and I still don't) what you meant/ wanted... Can you please try to explain again what you are looking for? Was your point that we need a forum for non technological users? If that's so, I don't agree that segregating users is a good idea for the open source XWiki project. Thanks -Vincent
O.K. I live with what I've got. Thanks Uwe
vmassol wrote:
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:
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?
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
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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. 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). 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. 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. 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...? brain[sic]
-----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
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
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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.
Me too :> And there's the rub, of course. The variety of topics that arise is as varied as the human imagination; as such it defies categorization, especially a priori but even after long experience, because of the variety of personal perspectives and because as a community matures it changes. Any attempt to sort it all into neat categories fails for several reasons: overlap in categories; difference of perspective; ambiguity of labeling; probably many more that I can't think of. That's why, like you, I favor Google's philosophy that searching is better than filing - when the tools are available to do it effectively.
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.
Here you make a very good point. I'm not certain whether this is included in what you mean by 'cross pollination' but I can certainly see a problem with a highly-segregated issue taxonomy not making the necessary connections between topic posters and monitoring listeners.
I'd rather we focus all on reducing the questions asked on the list by improving xwiki.org
A hearty Amen to that. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive, and those who find it necessary to create other mechanisms are always free to do that, and if they do, and are successful, they are very likely to contribute to the effort.
Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
What's your opinion?
www.jforum.net is free, and Java. Looks just like phpBB (without the security track record) just MHO. -Dave -- Dave Mangot Terracotta Inc. This e-mail incorporates Terracotta's confidentiality policy, which is online at http://www.terracottatech.com/emailconfidentiality.shtml
On Mar 14, 2007, at 12:36 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
Hi,
We're currently using mailing lists and IRC (and person2person chats) for answering user questions. But: - IRC has no history (yet; when's that bot coming online?) - mailing lists are not that easy to browse and search.
I don't agree. What is wrong with this for example: http:// www.nabble.com/XWiki-f2563.html
Should we make a forum for users?
Pro - One place where users can find information, organized by topics
We already have this: http://www.nabble.com/XWiki-f2563.html
- Users are used to posting on forums, and we might get a larger community
Same. See http://www.nabble.com/XWiki-f2563.html
Con - Soon it will get too crowded, and (some) developers won't have the time to answer all the emails; we need a strong community, and advanced users knowing the code, and for this we need documentation
As a developer, I'd stick to mailing lists. As a user, I'd say forum.
What's your opinion?
Mailing list: +1 Forum: -1 We already have the best of both worlds: Users can choose to subscribe to the mailing list or use Nabble to send emails to the list even if they're not subscribed to it. Thanks -Vincent
On Tuesday 13 March 2007 11:36 pm, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
Hi,
We're currently using mailing lists and IRC (and person2person chats) for answering user questions. But: - IRC has no history (yet; when's that bot coming online?) - mailing lists are not that easy to browse and search.
Should we make a forum for users?
Pro - One place where users can find information, organized by topics - Users are used to posting on forums, and we might get a larger community Con - Soon it will get too crowded, and (some) developers won't have the time to answer all the emails; we need a strong community, and advanced users knowing the code, and for this we need documentation
As a developer, I'd stick to mailing lists. As a user, I'd say forum.
What's your opinion?
personally I find email the best for discussions. I check it everyday, I don't have to learn how to use yet another forum system, searching is easy (I use kmail) and most mailing list keep archives. Best regards, Dave. -- Dr. David Holden. See: <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html> regarding Word or PowerPoint. GPG key available on request. -------------------------------------------------------------
participants (9)
-
Catalin Hritcu -
Connected Performance -
Dave Mangot -
David Holden -
hritcu
-
Sergiu Dumitriu -
THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) -
Uwe CP
-
Vincent Massol