So where did it go?
Like everyone else, I find myself looking back over the year from my personal viewpoint. It’s been a busy one. Balancing the needs of four generations of family, a hobbyist club website, supporting KDE users on mailing lists, and developing UserBase has not always been easy. From a KDE point of view, then, what have I achieved this year?
Six months ago the Community Working Group didn’t exist. I became part of the initial group, and we started work immediately. As a group we helped the community to define standards of behaviour that we, the KDE community, expected within the context of the community, resulting in a Code of Conduct being formulated and adopted. Helping maintain those standards has, as expected, not been onerous, yet it remains important.
As the year moved on it was a pleasant surprise when a developer turned to us for practical help, in a way that none of us had envisaged. He was pleased with the result, saying that it had helped his project, and we got the gratification of a positive feedback.
My work on giving support through mailing lists tends to be a more isolated role, and this year has been a hard one. There was a lot of unpleasantness from users who choose to use bleeding edge distros, but at the same time did not want to adopt new ways of doing anything. This persisted from spring, well into autumn. The last few weeks, though, have brought a gradual shift in attitudes. Life has been made easier by one or two people enjoying KDE 4 enough to start to help me in fielding queries. “Over my dead body” attitudes do still exist, but there has been a growth of grudging, “Might as well give it a try”, resulting in genuine questions about adapting. Much of it is fairly routine, being what most people first struggle with, but some of it highly technical as the user in question has very specific needs. Thankfully the KDE developer community has been very helpful to me in resolving the issues that are way outside of my experience.
Then there is UserBase. We started by moving user-centric pages from TechBase to UserBase, and built on them. Jucato introduced a structure and design, and the number of pages grows almost daily, now totalling around 210. I’m pleased with what has been achieved so far, but concerned that things have slowed down so much. The reasons for this are several, and very real, so let’s think about the future. What exactly do we need for UserBase to continue to develop?
Statistics tell us that we have 40 registered users, but only 6-8 people are actually contributing regularly. There are several levels of contribution needed, from time-consuming to dropping in from time to time. Let’s look at some of those needs.
Is English not your first language? If that’s so, could you translate a few pages, not just the one that is nearest to your field of interest? There are no deadlines here, but it would be nice to see a steady growth of “other language” pages.
There are still too many applications that don’t have a UserBase page at all. http://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Development illustrates this admirably. I’m not a developer and I don’t use those tools. At a pinch I could rustle up a few lines from available old web pages, but it wouldn’t do justice to the hard work put in to make those applications what they are. We really need developers who use the tools to help get those spaces filled.
Talking of developers and documentation, let’s think for a moment about the debate as to whether project web pages should stand alone or be included in UserBase. As I’ve stated many times, I think there is a place for both, but where the developers decide to keep their own web pages, I’d ask them to either update UserBase pages or to ask the CWG (or email me personally) to update them when significant changes are needed. The last thing any of us want is outdated information, giving a totally wrong impression.
I still dream of getting hundreds of users to add Hints and Tips for the various applications, but I have to accept that this won’t happen for a while. People have to get ‘settled in’ and feel really comfortable with the new applications and new versions before we will get a ‘Hey, have you seen this?’ type of contribution. I haven’t lost faith, though. I still think it can happen.
One other need I’d like to mention. From time to time we get ideas and suggestions that we can’t carry out because we don’t have the webdev/php skills. We really need one or more maintainers – preferrably a small team, to spread the load, which in itself shouldn’t be too heavy. I can’t see a continuous demand situation, and it would rarely matter if someone said “I’ll do that for you, but not this week/month”. Sometimes all it would really need is to listen to what we want then tell us why it’s a really bad idea, and that we should think again!
So what will 2009 bring? More of the same? Yes and no. I’m enjoying seeing the first snowdrop shoots of user interest, and I believe the negatives will mostly fade away in 2009, so user support should become enjoyable again. I believe UserBase has a great future – we just need to keep working on it. As for the CWG, if you haven’t noticed us doing anything, that’s good news. We’re here if you think we can help, whatever the scenario. If you don’t need us, we just go on working on our own interests. Yes, 2009 is going to be a good year!
See you in Gran Canaria!
annew
