[Fedora-marketing-list] Re: Community - Was - Ubuntu Release Party...

[Marc Wiriadisastra]

On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 17:10 +0100, Nicola Losito wrote:
> Il giorno 11/nov/06, alle ore 10:27, Karlie Robinson ha scritto:
> 
> > My best advice for Michael and Rahul... Tip of the week!  Not only
> > would you be helping novice users, but you'd get people into the
> > documentation to do a little more learning on their own.
> > 
> > 
> > I'm sure a tip of the week would be a welcome addition to Fedora
> > Weekly News.
> 

One of the things I've noticed as a comparison is not so much the
explaining of 'noob' questions or anything like that.  Its the fact that
we have to build/improve the community.

One of the best overall communities distro's that 'I' have seen is the
ubuntu one.  I'm not saying it is the best I'm saying its the best I've
seen.  I'm also not sure how to recreate something like that.  The
support, the help, the innovation that gets created.  The contribution
that goes back.

For example:

There is a modified gnome menu which you can download and install as a
deb. There is a bittorrent that you can download.  The help.ubuntu.com
page which is on their wiki.  The howto's which are everywhere.  The
supporting communities such as the ubuntuguide etc....  The steps they
are making to sort out user problems.  A simple backup program.
automounting of fat32 or ntfs.  Things like that or as soon as you mount
a harddrive it shows the link on your desktop.

All of those 'other' things help make the distro look better.  I love
fedora as a distro and have done for awhile.  One of my biggest gripes
isn't with the distro at all its with the community helping to make the
overall community better.  Its a catch 22 which I have no way of solving
or figuring out how to improve.

Now people can say well I can help contribute.  Yes I can I previously
started to create a fedora wiki full of howto's until I found
fedorasolved.org.  Which is currently getting rebuilt.  That is where
I'm currently contributing to help make it a haven of howto's.  To help
people do the stuff that they want to do.  How to install and run
freenx.  How to use xgl with nvidia drivers.  How to install
movieplayer. 

The doc's project will be better for it because I believe the non
propietary howto's will be sent back to the fedora wiki.

I'm open to suggestions on what we can do to help.  I personally don't
think redhat should get involved in it because I feel that if the
community see redhat getting involved they don't contribute.  They don't
seem to understand that a lot of the supporting stuff while the staff at
redhat contribute there are also people who don't work at redhat that
contribute.  I think that perception needs to be rectified.

The greatest example I've seen of this perception was when a guy on a
mailing list turned around and said that redhat should put someone in
the mailing list to monitor what people were complaining about. He
expected Rahul to do that.  Well for me I was stunned.  I understood his
comment to mean that redhat should do everything and the community
should do nothing.  I know not everyone see's it that way but I wonder
how many people see it that way.  It seems to be an us and them.  It
seems to be that don't worry Redhat will do everything or we can't
contribute because Redhat won't allow it.  Its very apathetic at times
which is annoying but understandable.

As always I may be way off or I may be interpreting stuff the wrong way
in that case please correct it.

Regards,


Marc