Defragging The Maemo Community
 

One of the biggest annoyances to me as a member of the Maemo community, who prefers the ITT forums, is the fragmentation I see in the community. Some hang out on the mailing lists, some hang out on IRC, and others hang out on ITT.

I was thinking about a way to tie some of these together, and I had a couple of ideas.

As the ITT forums prepare to move to maemo.org, I can see the beginnings of the defragging starting to happen. But I think we need to do more.

First, I think maemo.org should also host the #maemo IRC logs and any other IRC logs pertaining to Maemo.

It needs to be easy, once you are logged into maemo.org, to participate in all of the areas of community activity. This means easy web browsing of the mailing lists' archives, preferably in a threaded format. It probably would be best if the e-mail headers were replaced with maemo.org profile boxes. In short, it should be as easy to browse the mailing lists as it is to browse the forums, if not easier.

Active mailing list and forum threads should be promoted to the maemo.org front page just like planet posts.

It also seems very clear to me that we need a way to make it easy for people to search all the areas of maemo.org community activity, all at once.

So the search engine would search and produce results from:

• Maemo wiki
• Maemo talk (forums)
• Maemo news / planet / announcements
• maemo-* mailing lists
• Maemo downloads
• Maemo garage

As an added bonus, if you are reading a page from any of the above, the search engine could build you a "related reading" list at the bottom of the page that could list the top 3-5 items from around maemo.org that are closest in content to the page you're viewing.

EDIT: maemo.org front page could also have a link to a flickr feed, just to make things more multimedia :)

Any ideas?

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Qole,

Please, please participate in our web redesign meetings, every Tuesday (except for next) at 1400 UTC at freenode.net #maemo-meeting... Of course, any community member can join. ;)

Tim

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Unfortunately not everybody has the time or patience to frequent all three.

Talk to mgedmin and X-Fade. It's certainly an option, and I suspect mgedmin might just as soon be rid of the overhead, but he runs the bot and the log archives, so it's really up to him.

This was the plan (the beginnings of which are already up), unfortunately the Midgard module for it really needed a lot of work to get up to speed and it sort of fell by the wayside to stuff like the site redesign.

The Talk transition should make the whole thing a bit easier, the importer and posting mechanisms will just need to be tied to vBulletin.

Also the plan (you can see what it might end up looking like on some of the redesign mockups floating around), we'll need to finalize a metric for promotion, though.

s/Maemo/maemo.org/g :)

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Please file an enhancement request at http://bugs.maemo.org

Please look at

http://maemo.org/community/maemo-developers/
http://maemo.org/community/maemo-users/

And find specific enhancement requests based on what it exists.

Vote, cmment and help pushing the bug

Scoping maemo search does not work
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2684

File additional enchancement requests if needed.


There has been an extensive debate during the past months about redesign of the maemo.org homepage. Please follow http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Improving...mepage_refresh

So, all your ideas are very good and it's good to see *you* pushing them. As you see though most of them belong to started efforts that actually would welcome feedback and help.

In my experience, it is better to choose your battles and concentrate on just 1-2 where you can make a difference, keeping your contribution there until the task is done. Otherwise we have 1001 started efforts that are stagnant or processing slowly, even if NNN people think they are important and NN even offered help at some point.

See http://wiki.maemo.org/How_to_push_a_maemo.org_task

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

That's easy. It should look more like this:

maemo-community
maemo-developers
maemo-users

(all the maemo-related lists)

Nice, huh?

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Like this?

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//ma...ch/thread.html
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//ma...ch/thread.html
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//ma...ch/thread.html

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Make that the default. The current default is a mess. There's a partial threading thing going on, but it is inconsistant, the titles are huge, etc, etc.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

That *is* the default for mailing list archives. But that default will be more difficult to hack to integrate your fancy proposals e.g. avatars for posters.

The midgard integrated web-to-list forums is an additional work that was started and is now stagnant. You could help deciding whether we (and just to make sure "we" is the Maemo community e.g. you) want to keep developing the Midgard integration to make it better than the Mailman archives or just drop the effort and concentrate on other things.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

This is 7 AM my time. I'm not a morning person.

They invented the Internet so we wouldn't have to get up that early! :D

I think my problems are that:

• I don't like mailing lists because it is like inviting the guys from the pub to come and sit around in your living room; my e-mail inbox is not a discussion forum.
• I don't like IRC because it is so ephemeral; the discussion happens in real time and it happens when people are around to chat, which is rarely when I am available, here on the West Coast of North America.
• The forums are often considered to be a ghetto by many of the more respected people in the Maemo community, however, I personally prefer them over the other two.

So, anyway, I was trying to propose some solutions to bring things closer together. I don't really care if any of my ideas are used.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Great idea. You should be able to search irc logs together with forum posts (or even whole maemo.org including mailing lists)

Also some javascript based irc client directly on itt pages which would be logged into #maemo channel, giving you nick derived from currently logged itt user name would be nice to have. But maybe that would be too much of traffic for itt to handle?

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Oh cripes, not that. Too much traffic for #maemo to handle will be the real problem.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

wouldn't want the unwashed masses bumbling around in the clubhouse.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

I have a lot of experience with Java IRC clients, and the only thing they manage to do is severely impact the SNR of the channels that they allow access to. Now, this may not matter to people who aren't spending time in the channel, but for those of us that do, it's a rather significant burden.

For example, this is the sort of traffic that penguinbait's client on his blog tends to bring in.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

What if the client only allowed logged-on maemo.org users?

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

From a purely technical standpoint, a clean way of dealing with nick collisions would be needed.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Just noticed that the threads are sorted the "wrong way" for me; the newest threads should be at the top, not at the bottom. The Mail Archive version is still better for me.

I personally would make new forums / subforums under talk.maemo.org and make any posts to these forums act like the mailing lists. That is, if you post to these forums, the post is added to the mailing list. Perhaps only subscribers to the mailing lists can post in these forums.

But I suspect the main reason people use the mailing lists is because it is another way to reduce the "signal to noise" ratio. The threshold to entry is higher, so fewer "newbies" use the lists to post. Just another clubhouse.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

You, apparently, aren't a subscriber.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

that was what I was thinking too, itt (or maemo.org ? will both accounts merge?) derived nick like qole_itt or whatever and only logged in users of course. Also the entry/leave channel message had to be somehow supressed (which is maybe not possible?)

As for the traffic, yes, easier access could mean more traffic and reduced S/N ratio. However in theory anyone could join even now and the noise is already quite high so do you feel it is really closed club of well behaving people now? Also allowing only real maemo/itt users with some rules in place (ban, account locking, karma penalty?,..) could make them actually nicer than any random irc user.

Anyway, it was just an idea, even integrating current log and searchable archive without any ability to post could help.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Oh come on, there's better links than that! :D

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

There's this thing called "filters". Mailing list messages don't need to touch your INBOX, they can be easily and automatically filed in a folder. I have one for each mailing list I'm subscribed to, my mail client does better threading than a forum, better searching, and I don't have to go hunting for new messages, they come straight to me, and my mailer neatly tells me which ones are unread (and with a simple keypress I can go to the next unread). When I'm a newcomer or not a subscriber, I can search in the archives (I prefer gmane, but in a pinch google will do).

Well, I agree on this one. One of three, not bad ;)
A forum sucks: you have to go hunting for new messages (and meanwhile you're also downloading messages that you already read), there's usually no good threading support and it's more difficult to keep track of everything. Oh, and I don't have a local copy of the forum (my mail store is always there in case of need, though from time to time I just purge old messages).
It's difficult to follow more than a handful of forums, while it's much more efficient to be subscribed to various dozens mailing lists.
Sure, you usually (but not in all cases) have to subscribe, but I find it less intrusive than registering at yet-another-forum.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

You're telling me that firing a message to the subscribe address, or clicking on a subscribe button, is more difficult than registering at a forum?
Edit: note that the former only requires an email address, while in a forum you have to fill much more data (ok, you can fake it, but still you have to fill the form) and keep track of yet another username and password.
If anything, the barrier of entry is higher on a forum.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

luca: You're right. I was being argumentative and snarky.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

There is one big advantage of Usenet and e-mail over a forum: the raw data is parsed by the user's client and this can be processed by the user in any way they want.

You cannot do this with WWW (this very much helped the commercialization of the Internet btw). 'Web 2.0', JavaScript, CSS, XML, RSS, extensions attempt to make life easier by giving back some power to the user; but the core issue is still there. This conflicts with HIGs and such, and before you know it you have all kind of themes and websites optimized for all kind of devices. Or clients which pull the data via HTTP://, abstract it, and then put it in an optimized UI again.

OTOH because some metadata is saved server side (what have you read last time you logged in) some settings are saved for any logged in client. In e-mail this is the case as well, but not with Usenet.

IRC is an entirely different beast because it is real-time interaction and meant as such.

I believe e-mail and Usenet are good ways to communicate provided they are useful on the device we serve (including, preferably, backwards compatibility) with easy howtos to get these working well 1) effeciently 2) aesthetically on the device. Then, all the users are on an abstract platform while the power users can draw the power from their client and make everything the way they want it to be.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Ah, so we'll just need a QWK exporter for talk.maemo.org and a QWK reader for Maemo.

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Just a NNTP client which doesn't support HTML. Like tin or slrn. Or Mozilla Thunderbird if you wish...

Re: Defragging The Maemo Community
 

Either way, it's heavy coding for bronze age tech.

Offering a range of RSS and XML feeds from talk.maemo.org might be an alternative. I know next to nothing of vBulletin, but here are some quick examples:

• General as RSS or XML
• General and Applications as RSS or XML