Re: Help Us Take LiveCode Open Source
Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:44 pm
It probably wasn't clear, so I'll clarify. I'm not suggesting shutting the forums down completely, just no using them for technical Q&A any more. There could still be technical discussion, although it seems most of that happens on the mailing list anyway. In that situation you'd want far fewer boards than there are now, most of them seem to be extremely low traffic already.
A brief example of how this goes wrong from my experience at the Symbian Foundation:
The 3rd party Symbian developer community had a lack of deep knowledge and expertise about how to get the most out of the platform. When the project went open source lots of Nokia/Symbian staff members with deep knowledge were happy to share it with the community. However, the staff had existing comms workflow (habits/preferences) based around email - they signed up to mailing lists and waited for questions that never came. The 3rd party developers had habits/preferences set up for discussion boards (from previous Symbian and Nokia developer forums) so they came to the Symbian Foundation forums and asked questions that weren't often answered. (StackOverflow was new when the Symbian Foundation started and I tried to get them to abandon forums for tech Q&A in favour of it then - the more traditional marketing folks wanted to "own" the developers and have them coming to our portal regularly so the plan was sadly killed).
Right now, the situation looks similar for LiveCode - the most experienced contributors seem to prefer the mailing lists, while the newer community members don't find the lists and ask questions on the forum.
I don't suggest shutting down certain comms channels, just having very clear policy about what sort of communication happens in different places and encouraging people who post in the wrong places to shift habits. The other thing I saw with Symbian was that when you could get people to break out of their habits and engage with one another in a common place, great stuff happened - stuff that can only happen with open source. When 3rd party devs had problems that there weren't easy answers for, there was often someone motivated to improve the platform or tools to help solve them. The more quality answers were being given in a particular technology area, the more the community around that area grew.
No doubt some people will not want to change their habits and their contributions will likely be restricted to the channel they prefer. It's a relatively small price to pay for more efficient comms and knowledge sharing all round in my opinion (and it is just one opinion).
The only thing implied here that I disagree with is that the comms infrastructure around the project/platform should be set up to fit the habits and preferences of the current users. I think that kind of fragmented structure is a luxury for really big and popular projects. There are significant benefits to having certain types of activity focussed in specific places to maximise participation. Instead the correct tool for a each type of communication should be selected based on its suitability for hosting that communication.The user base is broad, with greatly varying habits, interests, and preferences. I'd advocate keeping what we have and adding to it, rather than reducing the variety of venues.
A brief example of how this goes wrong from my experience at the Symbian Foundation:
The 3rd party Symbian developer community had a lack of deep knowledge and expertise about how to get the most out of the platform. When the project went open source lots of Nokia/Symbian staff members with deep knowledge were happy to share it with the community. However, the staff had existing comms workflow (habits/preferences) based around email - they signed up to mailing lists and waited for questions that never came. The 3rd party developers had habits/preferences set up for discussion boards (from previous Symbian and Nokia developer forums) so they came to the Symbian Foundation forums and asked questions that weren't often answered. (StackOverflow was new when the Symbian Foundation started and I tried to get them to abandon forums for tech Q&A in favour of it then - the more traditional marketing folks wanted to "own" the developers and have them coming to our portal regularly so the plan was sadly killed).
Right now, the situation looks similar for LiveCode - the most experienced contributors seem to prefer the mailing lists, while the newer community members don't find the lists and ask questions on the forum.
I don't suggest shutting down certain comms channels, just having very clear policy about what sort of communication happens in different places and encouraging people who post in the wrong places to shift habits. The other thing I saw with Symbian was that when you could get people to break out of their habits and engage with one another in a common place, great stuff happened - stuff that can only happen with open source. When 3rd party devs had problems that there weren't easy answers for, there was often someone motivated to improve the platform or tools to help solve them. The more quality answers were being given in a particular technology area, the more the community around that area grew.
No doubt some people will not want to change their habits and their contributions will likely be restricted to the channel they prefer. It's a relatively small price to pay for more efficient comms and knowledge sharing all round in my opinion (and it is just one opinion).