Open question to all developers.

[FiNeX]

Hi all!


Lately KDE is having some troubles with the communication between developers, 
kde enthusiast and common users.


It seems that the current tools used for communicate are not efficient enough: 
wikis, ML, planetKDE, b.k.o... the informations are all present, but 
informations are too much and sometimes not well organized. This cause 
problems like what we've seen this days. People which doesn't help the 
development process, but which slow it down, bad words, and bad feelings, all 
things that I don't like to see on a project made by the passion!


My idea is to improve the organization of informations. How? 


One big problem is that users want features. Tom, our example user, probably 
have read something about feature X, somewhere on the web, Tom maybe want X 
and Y. He try a 0.x version, probably X and Y aren't there, maybe X is in 
trunk and Y planned for 4.2... who knows this info? Some knows developers, 
some infos are on the commit log, some else are on the wiki, some is in b.k.o 
and maybe on some blog entries in Planet.
At this point Tom try to ask it on b.k.o (Tom is not a skilled user, it is 
more easy that he doesn't use the ML).
Tom is a common user which doesn't like to read, moreover on bugzilla there 
are a lot of reports, so Tom doesn't look if X and Y are already there; Tom 
will ask again about X and Y, he want it and he doesn't understand that it 
has been planned, he is an user and (sorry for being rude) he doesn't like to 
reason out. At this point Tom expect X and Y, but developers are exausted to 
repeat all the same things, they doesn't know what to do more than they 
already did.
So Tom could think that KDE is a failure because his needs are not satisfied 
and the communication were not good.


If the development process could be transparent to users, with public, 
complete and updated infos about planned version and features, probably a big 
problem could be solved: Tom will find the informations he needs in only one 
centralized place.

Another problem will be solved: developers will not have to loose time to say 
$MAXINT times the same things :-)

I want to ask this to you, KDE developers, do you agree on this argumentation?

What do you think if I propose to adopt a centralized tool for managing the 
development processes like development plans, feature planning and so on?

Do you think it is feasibile?

This could be part of a new way for improving communication between you 
(develpers) and users.


Thanks for your attention.

Regards.


P.S: sorry for the cross-post

-- 
by FiNeX
http://www.finex.org
finex (@) finex (.) org
Linux Registered User #306523
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