[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

[Brion Vibber]

Michael Snow wrote:
> I tried to explain the difference in my earlier message. Basically,
> people see developer decisions and actions as more technical than
> political (most of the time), so they feel less need to be informed. And
> even so there have been plenty of complaints about lack of information
> from the developers - usually when something has gone wrong and the
> developers are too busy trying to fix it to provide much information
> back to the community.

We definitely need to do a better job notifying the public of issues.
Part of the problem is just need being disciplined about it -- being
busy or tired and assuming somebody else will drop a note when they're done.

Part of it is having too many possible channels of information: a couple
dozen mailing lists, a few hundred wikis, a myriad half-forgotten
community pages, village pumps, and announcements lists, several blogs,
topic messages on a half dozen (or dozen? or more?) IRC channels, etc,
about several different major projects and in many languages.

At a minimum, all relevant tech issues need to get noted at
http://wp.wikidev.net/Server_admin_log so all of us can keep track of
what's broken, what needs to be left untouched or fixed immediately,
etc. Hopefully, more public announcements of general issues can get done
too.

Roughly we can speak of three kinds of issues:
* Here's this neat new feature / old bug we fixed!
* There was a brief service hiccup, here's what happened, and a list of
expected side effects.
* Massive ongoing breakage: here's what's down and roughly when we hope
to have it fixed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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