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?