Welcome to UserBase
Hi – I’m Anne,a.k.a. annew. I live in Yorkshire, England, in the Pennine hills, which are very beautiful when the sun shines – which is not often enough! I spend all my spare time, and a lot that isn’t spare, working with KDE. I’ve been giving and receiving help on mailing lists since 2002, and now am devoting most of my time to helping UserBase get off the ground.
So where has UserBase got to? It’s hard to believe that it is only 6 days since “UserBase goes Live!” was posted. We now have 127 pages of content, and the number grows daily. We have 40 registered contributors – not bad for 1 week, but we need lots more. It is possible to edit without logging in, but there is one big disadvantage. We can’t leave messages for you. While Talk:UserName pages are not private and protected, they are less likely to be read by others than the Discussion pages attached to content pages. No-one is forcing you to create a login, but it does aid communication.
What will make it more useful for users? At the moment the first thing that users will notice is that they can get a very quick overview of what applications KDE offers. It may well be that we’ve missed some of the lesser known ones – now’s the time to add them and get them better known.
Application pages generally consist of an overview of the features, with a screenshot or two, and links to the project’s home page. All very good, as a starter, but not good enough. What we really need is a FAQs, Hints and Tips section for every one of those pages. If every KDE user added just one tip or one helpful screenshot, can you imagine what a resource that would make?
So is UserBase only to be a help to users? I hope not. UserBase is the perfect place to keep in touch with your project’s users. Set a Watch on the pages that you are concerned with. Use the Discussion pages attached to them to make suggestions. If users post a question on a Discussion page, you can either answer it there or add it to the FAQ section for the project.
Developers – we don’t want to add any burden, so tell us how we can help you. Users, tell us what you need and can’t easily find. There have been 52,763 page views so far – let’s make UserBase really work for everyone.
6 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Thanks (much) for the intro, Anne!
Ideas, SVP.
A Wiki isn’t an ideal tool at all. Far better (signal/noise, etc) than a mere message board (or mlist) for sure, but for, eg, issue tracking, specialized tools are way more effective. Though (search-based) tricks like category pages can go a long way.
The “talk” pages feature is useless and harmful, this ain’t Wikipedia, why feign maturity/completeness of content? Real communities are always in flux. This just obstructs collaborating by hiding discussions.
Lots more, detailed, use cases, like the few you mentioned, would be great for focusing and motivating UserBase. Then workflows/techniques for, well, working.
Quality control: to make content useful, usable, and searchable (as in SEO)… guidelines. Eg, omit needless words (cf EoS ;o). Prefer structure (eg, tagging) to verbiage.
This project needs vision/steering. (You? ;o)
Personally, as a busy developer wishing to contribute, I find *.kde.org useless. I guess there’re many like me who could’ve helped had the code (sources, tools, workflows, procedures, guidelines…) been accessible, accommodating. It’s a shame this huge human resource goes wasted, no?
(o;
http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok
can anyone please give this page som kde-love?
Hmmm… I’m still running on KDE 3 because I use sidux, which is based on Debian and I don’t want to use packages from experimental, which don’t allow me to keep KDE 3.
So, now to my question: is UserBase KDE4-only, or are KDE3-related entries allowed too?
I would like to see the inscription “to be continied”:-D
UserBase will certainly be continued, and I’ll blog from time to time. Naturally most of the content of UserBase is about KDE4, but there is already some KDE3 entries, and Hints & Tips from both versions are very welcome.
Hi, folks. My name is Frank (or MrSpock, because of my ears and my dream). I have started programming in 1985 and I work as a software developer now. I am basically both an old-school programmer (started with Pascal) and a new one (a child of the Internet era HTML, PHP) at the same time. I have basically lost a decade in the programming world. Losing the nineties is not as bad as it seems; I skipped the Windows era 😉
My dream in life is to develop affordable space travel and space tourism. As a result I also love collecting space related photos made by both pro’s and amateurs. One of own personal problems is that I tend to become an expert of a subject very quickly, so I have to keep changing subject often in order to stay sufficiently ignorant 🙂 This is why I am interested in many topics and many languages. Fortunately space travel has so far proven to be so complex that it will keep my attention for a long time 🙂
I’m usually more of just a lurker on the net but I’ll chime in when I feel I need to, looking forward to meeting everyone and being a part of the community! Well I won’t bore you guys and girls any longer, see you all around!