Needed?? The Suggestion Box??

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 29 March 2005 07:48, Tom Chance wrote:
> > i hope that one day (soon?) our user community will find a way to manage
> > these interactions in a way that is more rewarding for them, and thereby
> > for the developers as well =)
>
> Will they ever? I mean, how many KDE users are in a community that could,
> collectively, discuss and solve the issue? I'd guess an extremely small
> proportion. There's no such thing as one big KDE user community, just small
> groupings of people who happen to use KDE and who group around creating
> artwork, using Linux or some variant of BSD, etc.

supporting a community of users that can then participate in a coherent 
fashion would be great. it would probably take 1-3 individual users to come 
together over the internet and start things rolling to make that happen, just 
like how it usually takes 1-3 developers to come together over the 'net to 
get a new open source project rolling. users aren't any more or less 
inherently helpless that software developers, and a small number of software 
developers out of the total pool of them make open source what it is.

> Either it's not a big problem that many/most KDE users can't or won't use
> bugs.kde.org effectively,

i think the issue extends far beyond bugs.kde.org, it's just the most obvious 
place to see the challenges in action.

that said, while it may not be a huge problem for all users, it's certainly a 
growing annoyance (or worse) for more and more developers. and would it be 
more rewarding for KDE users if there were more user-centric channels for 
communication and interaction with the project available for them?

> or it's something that KDE contributors would do 
> well to discuss amongst themselves and with users.

why are things always pushed upon the shoulders of the developers, artists, 
translators, doc writers, etc? do they not already have enough to do? just 
being good at writing software (or other tasks in KDE) doesn't make you good 
at promotion, user community growth, etc... i find the "the developers 
should" response to be limiting.

it's also kind of innapropriate due to differing perspectives and expertise: 
it would be like saying the users should discuss amongst themselves with 
developers to decide whether DBUS is ready for KDE 4. ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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