Re: Debian is testing Discourse
Dan Purgert <dan@djph.net> wrote:
> On Apr 13, 2020, Sven Hartge wrote:
>> And I've also witnissed this in other contexts, be it in an
>> Enterprise setup (where one group flocks to Confluence and the other
>> stay in the mailinglist) or a MMO guild, where one group prefers to
>> converse in Teamspeak and the other uses the forum.
> forum-only people are filthy casuals and should be shown the door :)
Well, no. In my experience it always depends on what medium was first.
This one will have the most experienced users. Everything coming later
will most likely having a harder time getting (fully) integrated.
Again, in my experience, YMMV.
>> In all cases it lead to rifts and problems down the line.
>>
>> As hard as it is, one should commit to *one* communications channel
>> and only one, as to not create parallel "societies".
> In the groups I've been in, it was always that a formal discussion
> (e.g. a quarterly state-of-the group / planning session), if held on
> teamspeak, was recapped on the most permanent thing -- that is, the
> forums/mailinglist/etc.
Different subject here. Sure, you want to have the meeting minutes and
the decisions from the meeting somewhere to be referred to, be it a
website, a forum, a mailinglist (which feeds into an archive, which is
most times a website again).
But that comes *after* the fact, after the discussion and the decision
has been made.
In your example, everyone not participating in the meeting in TS is cut
off and only gets to read it in the minutes.
There was no live TS-to-IRC/forum transcriber active at the meeting and
nobody that read the IRC channel/forum back to the TS to get the other
people involved directyly.
What I am saying here is that by having multiple channels of
communication you naturally get different groups of people in them which
tend to drift apart sooner or later, because each group isn't
represented in the other media. And then you get the "forum casuals"
against the "mailinglist greybeards" against the "IRC noobs" in the end.
I can see why the GNOME people choose to close all other communication
channels and focus on one and only one: to avoid splintering the
community.
That by doing so they may have lost some members who absolutely didn't
want to use the new way of communicating and if they anticipated and
went with it anyways I can't say from the outside.
And I am also not saying that the way Debian does it up until now is set
in stone and can't be changed, because "that is the way we have always
done it!" is seldom a good argument.
Just that one should be careful and look at all the angles before making
a decision.
Grüße,
Sven.
--
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.
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