email vs forum (was Re: OK, the forum is coming..)

Jeff Rush jeff at taupro.com
Tue Jul 24 22:05:47 CEST 2007


kent at songbird.com wrote:
> 
> Well, then, why not have forums for people who want them, and leave email 
> for people who don't want them?   The thing is, it doesn't work very well in 
> practice.  If experience is any guide, then the technically knowledgable 
> people will use email, and won't waste much time on the forums.  But a 
> project at the current stage of the openmoko project will require lots of 
> *technical* help for everyone, so what will happen is that you will have to 
> follow the email lists anyway... I mean -- I could be wrong, but that's the 
> way things seem to go with this kind of project.

I agree with you, but no amount of debate will convince anyone and it is just
wasting bandwidth.  We're going to find out by experimentation but I expect a
repeat of the Golgafrincham civilisation from the Hitchhiker's Guide.  There
are already similarities, re what people expect from fire and what color the
wheel should be. ;-)  Those with the questions will hang out on the forum and
those with the answers will use the mailing lists, and people will grumble
about the unhelpful developers not coming over to the forum to help.  I'm
actually looking forward to the forums, to reduce that kind of traffic on this
list.  Sadly, I know of several people who have unsubscribed from this list
because of it, and switched exclusively to the devel lists instead.

Come on over to distro-devel and let's talk about builds and drivers!  Let's
get started working on the apps on the openmoko-devel list!

-Jeff




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