[Owncloud] ownCloud Mailing List for developers

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

Short wrap-up:


Mailing list:
There is no problem with having a second list explicitly labeled »for
developers«. Everyone can decide what they want to read, just like on
IRC. Let’s not start to bikeshed about mailing lists vs. forums – it’s
pretty clear we’ll continue to use a mailing list.


Help platform:
Forums are a pain, even for non-developers. Topics come up time and
time again because old ones simply get buried. The forum currently
seems more of a heatsink for user questions, which is a shame.
We tried http://shapado.com (open source, with voting similar to
StackExchange) which went pretty well, Robin and me were answering
more technical questions. Then someone opened the forum.
There already was a sprawl of help platforms. The in-app help is still
there, alluding that you can get help there. On
http://apps.owncloud.com/kb there are only very few answered questions
during the sample of last month – it’s very detrimental to user
experience to offer them »Help« and then not attend to it, hence we
should remove the function from the app.
I pleaded multiple times to only offer _one_ platform for user
support. I don’t even care anymore if it’s proprietary, probably we
should just use GetSatisfaction or StackExchange. But we have to make
a decision.


Community manager:
Last year I tried to do that as my time permitted. Looking for open
questions, issues, pull requests; running Twitter, Identi.ca,
Diaspora, answering to questions and informing people. This is a bunch
of work and should have one specialized person on it full-time, so
that developers and designers can focus on their stuff.
Meanwhile, Klaas’ suggestion that we all should be attentive of user
issues is very important.