[Mageia-dev] A little attention please

Mon Sep 20 13:54:06 CEST 2010

Hi,
+
+First, let me present myself. My name is Michael Scherer, and for those
+that do not already know me, I am a member of the Mandriva packaging
+community, and one of the 4 zarb.org admins. I am also involved in the
+launch of the Mageia project since the start some months ago.
+
+I just went back from FUDCON 2010 Zurich yesterday evening and I have
+been quite overhelmed by the amount of discussion that is going on at
+the moment, and I must confess that I feel more than stressed by
+everything that is going on, to the point I still didn't connect to irc
+yet. 
+
+Of course, we are all happy of the tremendous support of the community,
+but more than 500 messages in 2 days is a little bit too much for me to
+digest, and so I would like to share a few points :
+
+- please try to avoid sending emails like "i would like to help to
+$FOO". While we are quite happy to see such mails, they are not very
+helpful at the moment since we have to sort everything, and we cannot
+accept help on $FOO yet. We have started to think about how we can
+manage this, and we will likely soon setup a temporary wiki so people
+can add their name ( likely tomorrow, once we have sorted the really
+urgent stuff ), but in the mean time, I think people should wait a
+little. I would also like to remind you that you can also wait for us to
+ask for help, ie once we will need it. Let's say someone want to
+translate the distribution in french. If you want to do it, do not say
+"I want to translate". Just wait until we have something to translate
+when we will ask for help, and then sent the email. Or add your name on
+the wiki once it will be set up and announced. By acting this way, we
+will be more efficient as we will not have to search back in the
+archives to see who offered what, and have less mails to read
+( especially when we are very very busy ). 
+
+- please try to not start long discussions about technical details
+( like the thread about kernel-libre, about server component ). While of
+course we need to have technical discussions as every technical project,
+I must remind everybody that we do have any kind of infrastructure for
+the moment, so this is a little bit early to start. And discussing it
+now when we have nothing to commit or anything is IMHO distracting us
+from our priorities, and a source of future frustration for people, as
+we shouldn't make any decision in a hurry.
+
+- please do not forget there is some priorities in setting up. As
+someone who boast of having non existant skills in website on his blog,
+I am quite delighted to see people are eager to do the work, but I think
+we should first have a server to host the website before discussing of
+the logo. And so one. The same goes for codename, flickr account or
+others. So will I am happy to see that people are doing stuff that I
+will never be able to do properly, I think they need to realize that we
+are not ready to get contributions yet, and so that it will take time,
+and waiting can be frustrating, so please cope with us.
+
+- in the same idea, while it is wonderful to see that people want to
+start user groups in various country, I must remind the harsh reality
+that we have nothing to use yet. So there is no hurry yet. If people are
+really interested, I think it would be wiser to plan a little bit more
+the creation of the and try to get information on what is needed to
+manage a community, by reading books like "The opensource way", or "the
+art of community". I have plenty of ressources on the subject for those
+that want it, and I think it can take some time to digest.
+
+
+and, as a more personal note, please do not register every possible
+variation of the domain name. One of the few problems we faced while
+searching for a name was that a good part of all names were already
+used. And we painfully discovered that good names are a scarce
+ressource. So in order to be good netizens, I think we should act
+responsibly, and let others people use names even if not related to the
+project.
+
+Now, I must be clea, I do not ask to people to stop all discussions, far
+from it. You can discuss everything you want, but I would like to remind
+everybody to think a little bit of those that will read all the emails
+( like me ), and how much time this will cost to them. If I spend 1
+minute on every mail since the start ( as I need to get them from the
+web interface ), and since there was 520 mails in 2 days, this make 8
+hours to read everything properly ( without counting the 15 mails that
+appeared in the mean time.
+
+And while I will be reading this, I will not be setting the
+infrastructure or anything. 
+
+Thanks for reading my boring mail and I hope to be back on you soon with
+more interesting news.
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+