Like everyone else, I find myself looking back over the year from my personal viewpoint.\u00a0 It’s been a busy one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 From a KDE point of view, then, what have I achieved this year?<\/p>\n
Six months ago the Community Working Group didn’t exist.\u00a0 I became part of the initial group, and we started work immediately.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Helping maintain those standards has, as expected, not been onerous, yet it remains important.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 He was pleased with the result, saying that it had helped his project, and we got the gratification of a positive feedback.<\/p>\n
My work on giving support through mailing lists tends to be a more isolated role, and this year has been a hard one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This persisted from spring, well into autumn.\u00a0 The last few weeks, though, have brought a gradual shift in attitudes.\u00a0 Life has been made easier by one or two people enjoying KDE 4 enough to start to help me in fielding queries.\u00a0 “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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Thankfully the KDE developer community has been very helpful to me in resolving the issues that are way outside of my experience.<\/p>\n
Then there is UserBase.\u00a0 We started by moving user-centric pages from TechBase to UserBase, and built on them.\u00a0 Jucato introduced a structure and design, and the number of pages grows almost daily, now totalling around 210.\u00a0 I’m pleased with what has been achieved so far, but concerned that things have slowed down so much.\u00a0 The reasons for this are several, and very real, so let’s think about the future.\u00a0 What exactly do we need for UserBase to continue to develop?<\/p>\n
Statistics tell us that we have 40 registered users, but only 6-8 people are actually contributing regularly.\u00a0 There are several levels of contribution needed, from time-consuming to dropping in from time to time.\u00a0 Let’s look at some of those needs.<\/p>\n
Is English not your first language?\u00a0 If that’s so, could you translate a few pages, not just the one that is nearest to your field of interest?\u00a0 There are no deadlines here, but it would be nice to see a steady growth of “other language” pages.<\/p>\n
There are still too many applications that don’t have a UserBase page at all.\u00a0 http:\/\/userbase.kde.org\/Applications\/Development illustrates this admirably.\u00a0 I’m not a developer and I don’t use those tools.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We really need developers who use the tools to help get those spaces filled.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The last thing any of us want is outdated information, giving a totally wrong impression.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I haven’t lost faith, though.\u00a0 I still think it can happen.<\/p>\n
One other need I’d like to mention.\u00a0 From time to time we get ideas and suggestions that we can’t carry out because we don’t have the webdev\/php skills.\u00a0 We really need one or more maintainers – preferrably a small team, to spread the load, which in itself shouldn’t be too heavy.\u00a0 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”.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n
So what will 2009 bring?\u00a0 More of the same?\u00a0 Yes and no.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I believe UserBase has a great future – we just need to keep working on it.\u00a0 As for the CWG, if you haven’t noticed us doing anything, that’s good news.\u00a0 We’re here if you think we can help, whatever the scenario.\u00a0 If you don’t need us, we just go on working on our own interests.\u00a0 Yes, 2009 is going to be a good year!<\/p>\n
See you in Gran Canaria!<\/p>\n
annew<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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