Andreas Schuldei wrote:
we are considering opening a new low-volume, english mailinglist for discussion and announcments of debian-edu/skolelinux internal matters, like marketing, strategy, new employees-annoucements, world-domination planning etc. the idea is to make this a @skolelinux.no list, not a @lists.debian.org, since debian seems to be more about the technical big picture while this is more worldly stuff discussed here. But this is not at all decided yet, instead i would like to hear what you say. any thoughts?
Hello Andreas,I recognise the mental attitude behind the idea as one of creative construction, but at this early stage, a little premature in my opinion as:-
In an earlier communication to this list, I outlined advantages that could be obtained from maintaining all the various sociological aspects of the list centralised and interacting with one another, to obtain the full advantage of the community.
There were opinions voiced by the non-developer section of Debian-edu that stated that they were not particularly interested in the technical aspects/announcements on the list, and even one person stating that he filtered them out, but if the non-technical aspect of the Debian-Edu community were to become involved in testing the CDDs, for example, and providing feed-back from the actual user community for the developers to become aware of, this would promote the kind of progressive interaction and advancement that the open source community gains over the closed source non-community. This would also change the outlook of the non-technical section of Debian-Edu to the point where they would have a heightened interest in things like technical postings/bug reports. Perhaps one or two may even in time become developers/maintainers!
I know that all of this does not appear to address what you would consider to be the subject matter of your posting, I have simply tendered it as an example of the sort of advantages that are inherent in keeping a community together, instead of splitting it up into its' constituent parts.
Perhaps if I state from my personal experience in the field of product promotion, that nothing sells like the sincerity born from the attitude of being totally and intimately familiar with your product, and your belief in its' value to the market. And along the way, I don't think that it would do any harm if the developers were given the opportunity to contribute their opinions on how they would like to see their creation represented.
Regards, David.