<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/20/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jeff Rush</b> <<a href="mailto:jeff@taupro.com">jeff@taupro.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Mathew Davis wrote:<br>><br>> And I don't understand why we can't have both. I really don't see the<br>> problem so if someone could explain why not having a forum would be<br>> advantageous and not just personal preferance I am all ears, because I
<br>> could list a lot of reasons why forums could be advantageous.<br><br>I appreciate your viewpoint but here are a few reasons:<br><br>1. Our community is small -- spreading the discussions thinly before we have<br>
reached critical mass will dilute the synergy. We are just now starting to<br>come together as a community, and I think we even have too many mailing lists<br>as it is (not always clear on which one to discuss X).</blockquote>
<div><br>The community is artificially kept small by not providing a place for non-developers to gather. I hate mailing lists and I only signed up on this one because I'm desperate for OpenMoko information. Hundreds of other people probably aren't quite as desperate or hate mailing lists even more but they would have signed up at a forum.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">2. The OpenMoko team at FIC are spread _very_ thin and lack the time/resources
<br>to research and establish a forum themselves. They were overloaded just<br>getting a basic storefront up. I don't understand why a company the size of<br>FIC isn't providing more logistics support to them, so they can focus on the
<br>hardware/software but that's the way it is today.<br><br>3. Because of #2 and the fact this is the world of free/open, groups are<br>welcome to establish a forum someplace and announce it here. In fact no one<br>
can stop it. Then instead of debating it you apply the governance principle<br>of open source, in that if you build it will they come. If so, you were<br>right. If not, you were wrong. A very objective approach.</blockquote>
<div><br>We need a central official forum. We've got an official mailing list, wiki and chat. If efforts are not centralized, energy is wasted on answering the same questions and discussing the same stuff parallel at three places. The community probably isn't strong enough for THAT (yet).
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