[libreoffice-design] Re: [libreoffice-design] Migrating from Mail Listing to Forum

Hi Miguel, Kevin, Paulo, all

--- attention: very long mail! ---
--- Content is nearly the same as in the short version ---

I can't reply to every single mail, but I want to address all of your postings.

If I forget something, please remind me.

The topic "Forums vs. Mailing lists" has been raised several times on
the LibreOffice lists, leading to a huge amount of mails.

People spent hours of reading and writing, became angry and personal
and finally have lost their positive attitude with regards to the community
in general.

I don't think that we follow this way, because we want to work with the best
possible solution instead of posting and insisting on what we personally
like most.

I can follow all of your descriptions of forum advantages, but to make it short:

We still need mailing list communication and we need a repository for our
artwork and design - even for our drafts.

I didn't know that this version would become so long, so I wrote a short 
version and sent it first...

We want to compare them - and when it comes to iterative work by several
contributors, I don't know about any forum (I don't know most of them very 
well), that allows to download an attachment and upload it's update to the 
same location.

With regards to the mailing lists: 

I for one can't communicate with a web forum when I'm at work (and I spend
50 to 60 hours a week there) - all their URL are just blocked by my employeer.

And even if I'm at home: I don't think it is possible to start to use another 
resource in addition to the mailing lists where I have to read up to 300 mails
a day in order to keep in track with the LibO evolution.

I do quite an amount of work when I'm offline. Reading the saved mails and 
replying to them offline is the only chance not to be drowned in work. It takes
me just a few minutes online to get hundreds of mails - even if I can't follow
the links to proposals and images, I'm aware that there is ongoing work and
I mark the mails to follwo the links when I'm online again.

And there are more and more mails "sent from my  I-Phone", so others need the
mailing lists too.

I still think Andy's point about unreliable, slow and expensive web connections
is valid: Even in this group not every mail links to new artwork, and i don't want to 
exclude anybody with changing Internet access (good at school/work, poor at 
home, not too expensive in Internet cafe's) from our discussions.

So in my eyes mailing lists are a "must-have"!

The option to integrate mailing lists with a forum has already been raised by the
team exploring Drupal as possible long-term solution for our website. This 
discussion went huge and personal too, asking quite an amount of time from 
people interested in working instead of discussing, but as we saw a development 
that might have negative impact on the structure and workflows inside the entire
LibO community, we couldn't leave these discussions alone.

I don't want to restart this topic, but I think in the middle term we might get such a 
combined mailing list / forum approach.

For the moment all the people working on our web infrastructure are busy to finalize
our website and wiki, so this topic has to wait.

Using an external forum on our own with mail server capacity would be possible.
But LibO Design (UX Design as well as Visual Design) is one of the most central
areas in our community, linking markeing and development, native language 
groups and website. 

Our main communication channel will have to stay the mailing list - otherwise we
would exclude many community member interested in design, but not directly 
involved in the work here. And perhaps one or another might find the courage
to contribute actively to our work.

When you are heavily dependent on getting the important information fast (beacuse
you don't have much time for every single mail), the mailing list "rules" about proper 
quotation (remove all the parts you don't cite and post your comment directly below
part you refer to) become very important. In a thread over several days (even weeks)
you can't remember the details of the posting someone replies to. I don't read the
entire text, so I'll probably lose the "red ribbon".

When I tried to cite parts of previous mails in a forum, it has never been as easy as
in a mail (hit the reply button, remove the unnecessary content and reply inline). 
Perhaps I'm just not used to a forum, so at least with the second part of a mail I 
replied to I had to add special tags, copy&paste the citation and so on.

I don't have any problems to believe, that mailing lists are very uncomfortable and
hard to follow, if you can't filter the mails in different folders and don't have a 
threaded view on the mails, allowing you to see immediately who replied to
which mail. But most mail clients provide these possibilities.

Back to attachments: In my eyes the only attachments that should be posted to the 
forum are screenshots describing a problem or an intermediate result. 

"Final" proposals and drafts should stay at the wiki. They need to be discussed 
and compared side by side. I don't know if they can be extracted as easily from the 
forum.

If a forum can provide us with all the necessary tools (or with different workflows
that allow us to reach our goals without negative effects), I'd like to test it.

Of course this means that we have to define our workflow and needs, pros and
cons of every tool. But I don't want to spend time on repetitive discussions (sorry,
I had more than enough of them in the past) - time we really need to get our first
version of marketing material, design artwork and at the first point our icons out
in public.

Best regards

Bernhard




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