I don't think that "List for community development" mean that the list is for developers only.

In the wiki (a neutral place? ) the maemo-community mailing list is described like "For maemo.org web and community-process related discussions": https://wiki.maemo.org/Community_mailing_lists

If the Council decides to move the discussions here to the forum, I hope it will be highly moderated. It can't be like the rest of the forum (20 threads for the same problem, many off-topics posts, etc., well, you know what I mean).

Also, RevdKathy has a valid question, what would happen if the next Council prefer the mailing lists, and they decide move the discussion there?
It can be a valid question for other new problems on the future too.

Trust me, it doesn't matter. There are always plenty of people mor ethan willing to stuff wax in their eyes, cover their eyes and run around screaming about a Nokia/maemo.org conspiracy. No matter how hard you try to inform everybody of the discussion then the consensus, they wont notice until after the change is implemented then they'll scream like banshees about it.

Unpleasant stuff that's one of the big reasons I stopped being involved in the council and related stuff.

I'm sorry to hear that GA. But not surprised.

In the end there's something about a clear conscience. If you can lay your hand on your heart and say that you know you communicated clearly and people chose not to listen, then at some point you have to push the responsibility back onto them. It's harder with several channels of communication to be sure you've done that. But you will never please all of the people all of the time. Even in Maemo.

This was never said by anyone. If you post an email with a link to a thread, and ask kindly if the mailing list contributors take a look at it, they will. They will comment, mostly as a reply to the mailing list, but they will read and listen. None of us ever said we didn't go to tmo at all, some of us just don't have the time to read through all the different topics to try and find one that is interesting and worth spending any kind of effort on. And no, you can't blame anyone for that.

Why? I'd be more inclined to believe that the majority of new users (influx from the N900) don't care about Mailing Lists because they believe them to be archaic. We can't blame the mailing lists users and then give a free pass to tmo users. Both have an equal amount of blame to share. Yes, we ought to celebrate our differences, this doesn't mean that some people get a get-out-of-jail card. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of money that nearly every single user who has been here more than two months, wants to be involved and isn't just here to get some apps on his device and then close the browser window knows about IRC and the Mailing Lists. Whether they chose or not to join is another issue.


Not only is this insulting, it's downright outrageous. You go about to make this great and useful post and then lower yourself to the level of all the stupid things that have been said. The Mailing Lists users don't feel part of a secret gang. The truth is most of us don't care. We don't have the time for these kind of stupid little politics games, and drama queens uprisings. The -users mailing list is generally laughed at, the -developers mailing list is pretty well endowed and -community is there to accommodate those users who want to participate but haven't found a better way to do so.

For example, I'm now in Australia, and will be for the next few months. After you've posted this message, there have been nearly 10 replies before I came online. I don't go through every page of a topic, no matter how nice it is, because I don't have the time. I skim through it, and only pay attention when attention is obviously needed. Am I to blame? Yeah, sure. Will I change my behaviour? I'm not going to lose my job because of this community or its tantrums, so no. However, you posted a link/copy of your message to the mailing list (not in the correct, but never mind), which popped up directly on my N900's screen and in GMail when I opened the laptop. I didn't have to look for it, it was staring me right in the face.

There is no ML-users clique. There is no conspiracy to try and keep our ML squeaky clean. We just use it because a/ it's low traffic, b/ I can reply to any message, no matter how many truckloads of messages have been sent afterwards. I know the intended people will read it. I have no such guarantee in tmo. People could never come back to a specific thread after posting a response. How good is the communication then?

I've never heard of this, and even if it were true, no important decisions have ever been taken without doing a referendum. Each council can completely change the things that a previous council had put in place, if the community wants it. Don't forget, the Council are here to serve you, it is the community's duty to make sure they do so.

Also, it might be beneficial to point out that at some point, most users (and yes, by this I mean any user who's worthwhile, who is here to make the community go forward, not just download 3 apps and f off) were on both tmo and the ML. ML threads are widely discussed on IRC, and it's rare that one specific conversation doesn't leak into the other media within a day or two.

The following are my personal opinions. As an ML reader/user and tmo user.

Denied. People won't do it. You can send links to important messages, as we've done for the past few years, but ask them to willingly go read messages where people go "OMFGWTF NOKIA SHOULD BE FIRED~!!!!~`!11!" is just madness.

Agreed.

This is already in place as far as I'm concerned. During their "electoral campaigns", council members reflect their commitment and knowledge of the community, and the only way to get enough traction now that we have tens of thousands of users, the only way to do this is by being present on every single media.

I will say it once again: There is a solution to this issue, and it is by having aggregated content from all media be published on a weekly fashion. This has been proposed by Jaffa months ago. I also suggest to everyone in this thread to pay very close attention to the Google results linked previously. They contain results for: mailing lists, tmo, twitter, etc.

This, in my opinion, answers the whole thread.

PS: Unless the course of discussion changes drastically (finding a solution rather than arguing in circles), I will close this thread and create a new one as per that goal.

I think you'e misreading me, CrashandDie. I was repeating some of the reasons people said that the ML should be closed. I do not believe it should be.

1) There have been complaints that people don't know what's going on in one place or the other. Why else would there be a suggestion to close one or the other? I do believe that many t.m.o. people don't know there's a community mailing list: they arrive at the board from a search engine and stay. I also believe that ML people do know about t.m.o. are making an active choice not to check here - for exactly the reasons you outlined, rather than acting from ignorance. Neither group is 'getting a free pass'. It's you who are putting a value judgement on one rather than the other. Personally, I'm rather ashamed of my ignorance.

2) If you'd like to read what I said, I specifically said that I was avoiding the concept of clique because I don't believe it. But it's been hinted at. All I did was put it in the open, so I could kick it into touch. The two media are simply different methods of communicating as far as I'm concerned.

As for decisions being made in oly one medium, you haven't read the thread? Because that's exactly what was described - I believe the example given was the changes to board layout and colour scheme. (It was all before my time, so I'm only going on what was said here).

The idea of weekly news is fine but it's not the solution that was under discussion: that was the one already declared as an agreed goal in the wiki of closing the ML. Personally, I think that would be a big mistake.

Oh Reggie, could you turn on the threaded discussion feature? The "flatness" of the discussion threads on TMO has always been one of my biggest annoyances. It would allow readers to skip past tangents in the discussion that they're not interested in.

and you asked to close the mailinglist?! getting a proper mail program which can handle lists (threads, close sub-threads, split threads...) might help you to understand what a powerful tool mailinglist servers can be... apart of being readable in an inbox...

Yes, except again: the most vocal mailing list devotees prefer raw text as far as I've seen. No fancy formatting. Useless in a reader that wants to structure the content.

chemist: I believe there are some advantages to a mailing list.

But many of the deficiencies of typical forums can be fixed. Look at the excellent comment system on Slashdot for instance.

Oh how I envy the Slashdot comment system.

I think I am done here... people trying to get rid of a mailinglist try to make a forum look like a mailinglist and dont understand that a forum is an eye-candy blown click WYSIWYG mailinglist...

all what matters is: getting those two together, Jaffas Weekly (I now know about it and have to apologize!) in place, activate some more rating features and pump (pimp) the forums with some mailinglist features (please, I'm begging you, dont do slashdot) and we have and are where everyone will be happy...

agreed?