Calling development teams

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 20 February 2009, KDE forum administrators wrote:
> On top of that, forums have a few advantages over IRC and mailing lists:
> - everybody knows how to use a forum, unlike IRC or mailing lists
> - forums look more attractive; this may not be important to developers,
> but it is to users
> - our forum centralizes knowledge about many applications and platforms
> into 1 location

yes, those are advantages, however these:

> - messages posted to a forum are saved and searchable
> - forums are moderated
> - forums bring people in different timezones together

are all just as true of mailing lists.

> -----
> Application specific forums.
>
> Not all development teams have enough resources to host and moderate
> their own forums, yet each development team needs to communicate with

we have one of these for plasma and it seems to be working wel.

> -----
> Private, restricted forums.
>
> KDE Community Forums would like to offer you the opportunity to host
> your own private, restricted forums to be used by your team. These
> forums would be invisible and inaccessible to people who are not members
> of your team. This would give you as a team a central location to store
> reminders, to hold discussions you would like to save for the future,
> and to have discussions with members who are hard to reach, for example
> because they are in different timezones.
>
> If you are a member of a KDE (related) development team, and you are
> interested in hosting your private, restricted forums at KDE Community
> Forums, contact us at admin at forum.kde.org.

this, however, makes approximately zero sense. we don't work behind closed 
doors and we have no need for another developer communication channel. we have 
the techbase wiki, the mailing list (which is archived) and the irc channel.

i can see an interest at some point perhaps for a web forum for people writing 
plasmoids as that becomes a more mainstream activity, but for our own needs i 
don't think it would add anything except fragment our communication. 

and i think that's true for any kde project.

i really appreciate what you folks are doing with forums.kde.org; it's 
immensely valuable and useful as a service to our various audiences. we'll 
continue to use forums.kde.org for, e.g., the plasma user forum.

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20090220/2ac158e2/attachment.sig