Forums vs Mailing Lists

[Corey Burger]

On 12/22/05, Jeff Waugh <jeff.waugh at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> <quote who="Daniel Robitaille">
>
> > I'm not sure it is a good thing on the long run to have a growing
> > resentement that we have 2 separate community, one mailing list based, and
> > one forum based, and the developers tend to hang in one side of the fence.
> > But is there anything we can do?  It's not like we can force people to
> > join the forums, and we cannot force people to join the mailing lists.
>
> This has been tugging at my conscience for a while now, too. While I would
> like to suggest that we have every mailing list mirrored on the forums, I
> know that many of the mailing list contributors [1] regard most of the stuff
> coming from the forums as noise. It takes me a long time to pluck up the
> courage to read ubuntu-users these days, because there's just so much there;
> I can't imagine reading that *and* the forums every day! :-) But I'm trying
> to at least read ubuntu-users more often regardless. Now there's an exciting
> New Year's resolution!
>
> This is a tough one, and I don't think there's a simple answer (social *or*
> technical)... Would love to hear suggestions for how we can tackle this.
>
> - Jeff

I pretty regularly follow the Dapper Drake development forum and try
and inform people there. Even having just one person follow a single
forum is a lot of work. Maybe someone/group could do a "this week in
the forum" stuff for the developers, IE,  a distilled essence of what
people are talking about in the forums that is very signal oriented
and thus would be read.

To be clear, I don't regard the forums to be noisy, merely that a lot
of people don't have a lot of time to follow development news and are
thus making statements without the full facts. Thus we could have a
"This week in Development" on the fridge or Devel-announce to help
people get organized.

I think I could be able to help on either project, if others wish to
join me/think it is a good idea.

Corey

On the reverse, we could have a "This week in Dapper developmenht