Unified internal communications channel

[Carl Schwan]

On Thursday, December 7, 2023 4:15:36?PM CET Nate Graham wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> There have been a couple instances of drama this week caused by
> decisions being made without some of the relevant stakeholders knowing
> about them. In all cases, the decisions were announced, but either not
> announced in the places where all the stakeholders saw it, or not all
> stakeholders were able to notice the announcement in a place where they
> do generally pay attention.

The drama could have been avoided if the promo folks would have followed my 
recommandation to contact the relevant stakeholders in the plasma-
devel at kde.org mailing list or attend the Plasma chat meeting hapenning every 
Monday at 4 PM in the Plasma matrix/irc channel. I tried to bring this up many 
times and it was dismissed every time i brough it up and I was told that I 
didn't understood the proposed idea and that should re-read the previous 
messages. It is unfortunately a recurring pattern in the promo channel and I 
decided for now to leave the kde-promo matrix channel as I feel like I'm 
wasting my time there.

> It makes me think that maybe the KDE development community has grown so
> large that we can't reasonably expect everyone to be paying attention to
> everything, or for everyone with something to announce to know exactly
> where the people who need to know it expect to find those messages.
> 
> So perhaps this could be addressed at the source by creating a single
> unified "internal announcements" place that everyone can pay attention
> to without fear of being spammed with too many messages. In theory the
> kde-devel mailing list is one such place, but it's got more than just
> announcements, and also mailing lists aren't very accessible for a lot
> of newer contributors who didn't grow up with them.
>
> What I'm proposing is some kind of place that *only* has internal
> announcements and is very log signal-to-noise such that we can
> fearlessly recommend that *everybody* subscribe to it. In addition,
> ideally those who want to subscribe via mailing list could do so, but
> its content would automatically appear in other places too, such as
> discuss.kde.org and an invent.kde.org project. That way people can
> subscribe by whatever means is most comfortable to them.
> 
> Thoughts?

I fear this will just create a new source of information instead of unifying 
the source of information. We already have the following channels for 
announcements:

- planet.kde.org: contains release announcements, gear release schedule 
announcement from Albert as well as random development updates
- kde-code-devel at kde.org: contains mostly news about new apps and modules
- kde-devel at kde.org: contains the gear release schedule announcements and 
other technical announcements
- plasma-devel at kde.org: contains important for plasma developers and the 
meeting notes of the monday chat meeting.
- kde-community at kde.org contains general community (non technical) 
announcements

Adding a new channel that is either a mailing list, rss feed or a forum 
category won't help and will probably only makes it worse. It's also very 
difficult to defines that is an important internal news for the whole community 
is as it will be different for every subproject in KDE. The plasma logo 
discussion would have not been very relevant for any app developers. Similarly 
discussion about the new default database backend for Akonadi won't be 
interesting for Plasma developers but might be interesting for KMyMoney and 
other non-PIM apps using Akonadi.

Something that might help is merging the kde-core-devel and kde-devel mailing 
lists as those are very similar and should hopefully not be too complicated to 
do.

Cheers,
Carl
> 
> Nate