Open question to all developers.

[Kleag]

Hello,

Well, maybe my answer will not be seen as constructive enough because it is 
not applicable right now, but I think that in the long term, we need automatic 
tools able to build condensed texts merging all the sources of information you 
cite.

Let's imagine something: the spider uses classic crawling and search engines 
to find data about KDE development. It analyses all this multimedia data and 
build a semantic representation of all this, with point of views, levels of 
detail, etc. Then Tom (your user) look at a dedicated page for average users 
or builds his own profile. Our system then generates explanations in Tom's own 
language...

Well, this is still science fiction but a large part of the necessary 
infrastructure and tools is already there, often as free software and even as 
KDE projects (see strigi and nepomuk). 

Then computers will help human beings and developers to understand each others 
:-)

Bye.

Gaël

On Wednesday 25 June 2008 23:48:22 FiNeX wrote:
> 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

-- 
KsirK - a world domination strategy game 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/Tactic_and_Strategy/KsirK

KGraphViewer - a GraphViz dot graphs viewer
http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kgraphviewer