Announcing #userbase
Many people know me through my work with UserBase , where I’m a (the?) major contributor. I’ve seen myself described as the UserBase maintainer. That’s in no way an official title but today that’s the hat I’m wearing.
UserBase has the potential to be a truly awesome resource, and if you look at some of the statistics it’s getting there. 782 content pages. 539 registered users. Total views 1,387,442. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what about this statistic? – Users who have performed an action in the last 7 days 14! And when you look at the Special:ContributionScores you see that, taking out the excellent work being done by translators (Claus_chr, Yurchor, Qiii2006 and Alisha in particular) you can only conclude that there’s simply not much new content being added. That’s a terrible shame, considering the cumulative knowledge of 539 registered users.
I’ve been worrying about this for some time, so when I saw a link to http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/ and found the heading “Know Your Team” I began to wonder just who is ‘my team’. In truth, I know very little about most of the 539 people who have registered, so now it’s time to find out. Why did you register? What are your hopes, your expectations? How can I help you become more involved?
I’ve talked to a few people when they identify a problem with which they would like help, but waiting for that to start a conversation just isn’t enough, so I’ve registered a new channel, #userbase, on Freenode. I’ll be around most days, so I hope you’ll join me there. Tell me about the applications you like to use. Tell me your favourite features. Tell me what you wanted to know and couldn’t find information about. Tell me how we can make UserBase into a truly awesome beast.
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Hi, I’ve just checked userbase.kde.org, that looks gorgeous! Thanks for all the hard work it must have taken. And yes, I can see how wikis don’t, by themselves, enable a very personal connection between contributors.
@Benoit Thanks for the encouragement. I hope you’ll join us on #userbase (or #kde-userbase, as it’s about to become) and exchange some ideas with us.
Must say that the userbase is not marketed enough.
Is this userbase site well published on kde site(s)?
@Fri13 I think it is linked from the main KDE sites, but in the end it takes a lot of mentions by users to get the word around. Every time you point someone to an existing answer an userbase you bring another user, with another point of view and his personal experiences.
I created a UserBase account because I wanted to play with OpenID login… not a particularly good reason, I know. =/
@Samat Was it successful? Some people are very happy with it, while others have problems.