FreeRunner delayed a further 6 months?!?!??

[Kevin Dean]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 8:38 PM, Michael Shiloh <michael at openmoko.org> wrote:
> Hi Lally,
>
>  This is clearly my responsibility, and in fact there is such a page:
>
>  http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates
>
>  I confess I have been lax in the past few months and have not updated
>  since January, but the status is in fact the same as it was then.

I've been meaning to e-mail you personally about thing bugging me but
this conversation very vaguely touches on some, so I'll enter it here.
:)

We, the "openmoko community" demand you communicate with us. We
complain when you don't. The flip side is true with us, however. You
can't be expected to communicate to us about the things that matter
unless we tell you clearly WHAT matters.

I think this shows on both sides, however that there are clear
communication issues.

One thing mentioned in the IRC chat several days ago was a notice on
direct.openmoko.com telling people of the impending Freerunner
"debut". As it is RIGHT now, people interested in supporting OpenMoko
are being turned away, but you're providing no curiosity pique for
those people to return at a later date to make a purchase. Lally
raises the point of the "community" responding here with a "read the
topic" response but OMi should really be directing how they want that
handled. Do you want interested persons to turn to IRC and ask a
question we're "all" tired of answering, or have those interested
people be put on a mailing list to be informed when they MAY spend
their money on this project?

I don't presume to tell you how to do anything, and I'm not even
dropping the implication of incompleteness or incompetance here, but
OpenMoko at this point DOES have a fledgling brand identity and it is
in the interest of both the project AND the company to ensure that
what is said "in the name of" OpenMoko is indeed reflected by aims of
the project.

>
>  There is some confusion as to whether A5 is known to be inadequate and
>  whether A6 will be a necessity. I am trying to get to the bottom of this.

Some people understand what this means, and some people do not. Gnome
devs need to sometimes remember that there's dealing with people who
can't tell a cursor from a config file. :) Openness mean sometimes
admitting when someoen doesn't know something. Even saying "I've sent
out some e-mails but haven't gotten anything I can share" means
something. Of all of the people on the IRC channel at any given say, I
know several of them are NOT subscribed to this list. What this means
is that "updates" are spread by word of mouth and evolve with every
telling of the news.

I'm under the impression that OMi just hired someoen who's sole job
will be to organizize the Wiki and make sure that the information is
either up-to-date or clearly marked "out of date". The goal here will
be to clear out the dead content and grow new content but the VAST
majority of people don't know that this person has been hired, and
even fewer of us have access to the company directory to e-mail her a
question - this kind of development is (for some) as important as
knowing of the some transistor is vital or just "helpful for the
future".

>
>  Michael
>
>
>