In an effort to increase our visibility within the Bioware community, I've taken the liberty of creating the OpenKnights Guild on the Bioware site.
I've sent out a slew of invites, however, for me to send you an invite, you have to already have a Bioware Guild/Registry profile. If you do not have one, you can either create one and let me know, or you can browse the guild list and request an invitation through the site.
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Phantom: I wish to cast my vote of appreciation for your desire to raise the OK visibility. I'm sure that your efforts along with Byril's (who would probably appreciate an opportunity to collaborate with you on these outreach activities) can help us connect with other members of the NWN community, both future collaborators and users.
However, forgive me if I don't see the point for me in particular other than to give me *another* set of forums for me to monitor. (Lately I am hard pressed to get over to the For Devs on the BioBoards and that is arguably much more critical than an OK BW Guild). The sourceforge setup works pretty well. In particular I like being alerted to posts via e-mail (it combines the virtues of a forum with the immediacy of communication of a mail-list... one reason why we *don't* have a mail-list for OK). As you have said elsewhere, the SF boards represent a huge amount of "legacy" on the OK efforts. I would think it better for visibility to keep plugging at their existance rather than to try to replace/augment them.
I mean I will probably get around to accepting your invite to the Guild, the next time I'm on the Bioboards, but I just haven't had time lately just to get there. (Does that tell you something?) But I'm afraid that rather than raise our visibility, this might (inadvertently) end up dissipating and fracturing our effort. (This is similar to the whole IRC channel discussion. In moving to the NWConnections server, I will probably just *move* to that one, and not try to have a personal presence on both the old and new channels. That isn't to say that people might have a use for both... (e.g. linux support continues on the old one), but I won't have the time *myself* to be a part of both (to the extent that I am a part of either).
So unless the other key players start making important discussions on the Guild boards, I'll keep most of my commentary here. I might poke my nose in once in a while, maybe to direct people to *these* boards.
Now, this is not to say that Guild couldn't be useful at some level, in that it might give another way to route people to useful information (but isn't that what the tiki is for?) as well as allowing for alerts for OK announcements (activities, product releases, etc.) We could have some useful discussion of how the Guild could *augment* the SF and tiki material. (But let's have it here, eh? ;) ).
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It's all about traffic. One of the main reasons for having the guild is so that everyone else, users, developers, etc, *don't* have to check multiple places. Having the forums be at the guild allows people who are already checking the Bioware forums and reading the various threads to view the discussions between OK members without having to go elsewhere. Having the forums there allows people to more easily see OpenKnights as an active community, not a secretive cult.
OpenKnights has been hidden away on Sourceforge for far too long. It is great for hosting the releases and CVS repository. It hosts our website as well, which is great. But the forums here, useful as it has been for communicating with each other, has hurt us in terms of finding new people. In essence, you're asking them to do exactly what you're complaining you'd need to do to start posting in the OK Guild instead.
I do not agree with you at all that the forums are better off being here. When I found out that someone who is actually listed as a member of this project on Sourceforge thought the movement had stalled long ago, it re-inforced my belief.
I'm sorry if it makes life a little more difficult for you to peek in on the Guild forums every so often. Given that if you login to the site and go to the Guild, you should be able to tell which threads are new and which are not by whether the circle to the left is colored green, I don't see how this could be such a show stopper. If it makes it easier, threads can be made sticky as requested.
I would appreciate it if you do not try and direct people back to these boards. If that's the only reason you can find to visit the Guild forums, I would expressly request that you don't then. I am sorry that you cannot see the benefit in the forums being at the Guild. On this, we will have to agree to disagree, but I'm not going to stop pushing for the forums to remain at the Guild.
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Having a Guild does not by itself help us "find new people". There are just too many other Guilds out there. What helps is visibility and posting in all the other places. (And that includes the various (nonGuild) Bioboards, and the Vault, and in other places on the net. So help out Byril, he could use a hand.)
And of course what helps the most is having something to post *about*, which means getting products out there. You think the Guild is a help. Fine. More power to you. I hear that sumpfork is posting on the Guild boards. Good for him. It's all about what enables the devs.
So are you recommending that we officially terminate using the SF boards? (BY the way, would you like to be made an OK admin so that your vote matters officially?) Have you found a way that I can get e-mail monitoring of the forum boards (the only way that I am honestly able to keep up on these puppies). Yes I know about the color coding... you miss the point, though, it is *another place* to go and check the color codings. I've got two already (Mac and For Dev and should probably look more on the linux board as well) and I get to them once ever two-three days. The SF boards get instant coverage.
If the group decides then I'll go (grumbling, and less affective unless you meet the technical challange).
I'm also sorry that you or others think that the current setup was a secretive cult. (That kind of hurt, by the way... I've been trying the best I knew how, but I've always considered the Open Knights, well.... Open.) Maybe its time for someone else to try to keep things cooking along.
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Checked into the email notification issue on the Bioware forums. Unfortunately, the only time email notifications are available are when you're the one who started the topic.
For the record, the secretive cult was not my impression. I'm well aware of the meetings that have been going on, though I keep wandering into them on accident as opposed to being consciously aware of them. The first time I heard the term used was when one of the DLA guys lambasted us with regards to who would be maintaining Torlack's compiler. That stung quite a bit as my reply to him indicates even though I'm not a developer and my contributions to OK up to that point had been more related to floating ideas.
It would have been easy enough to blow him off as a pompous, ignorant blowhard given some of the stupidity in the rest of his post, but unfortunately discussions with a number of people in the wake of neveredit 0.4 being released and the Guild being opened made me re-think that particular piece.
OpenKnights does have a problem with its public perception, Ras. If new beta releases were coming out on a regular basis of the different OK projects, this wouldn't be an issue. The releases would speak for themselves.
But Ras, take a look at the CVS repositories for the different projects. Most of them haven't had a commit in months. The two that have, neveredit and NWNAutoUpdater, are for all intents and purposes being done by two people. While NWNAutoUpdater shouldn't need many more revisions other than to bug fix, what happens to neveredit if Sumpfork can't commit time to it for some reason? It's the most promising OK tool yet in terms of achieving the original goal, a Toolset alternative. It runs on all three platforms. It has quite a featureset already. And if something prevented Sumpfork from working on it, it would be dead in the water. That's a very chilling prospect. It's why I'm pushing so hard and will continue to do so.
This is not a shot at you, Ras. You've put in a hell of a lot of time into OpenKnights, running meetings, programming Manfred, answering forum posts. This is not about minimizing what's been done here. This is not about questioning leadership. It's about figuring out what to do next to help OpenKnights grow. We need more than one person working on each project. To do that, we need more devs than we currently have now.
You want to continue to hold discussions on Manfred, and whichever of the other tools you're the project lead on, here at the Sourceforge forums, then do so. It's your perogative. No one can force you to do otherwise. But let me ask you this.....how many people playing with the Mac Client even know of Manfred's existence or what the eventual goal is? And if they don't know, how can they possibly ever help?
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I do have to say that the BioWare forums are more friendly to me than these are, but I'm not a developer and have never used SourceForge before this.
PhantomNJ, it sounds like you have more issues than just the forum, and that's okay, but I really think you (and I) should be working more with Byril and not bugging the developers as much as possible. (Unless you're a developer, and in which case, I should just shut up and go home now.) They know what they need far better than we know. If we go out and find more developers, we can send them here, or hook them up with other developers' BioWare private message names, or find a way for them to get in touch here (oh, there is a contact email address in each of our profiles).
The last thing we want to do is make things more difficult for programmers. Outreach people and groupies can do a great job of making contact with other organizations, we can take the *condensed* information from here and write it up and post it on the Guild Forum, but really, there is a lot of information here that I have no idea what it means, and I expect that most people don't except developers. And most anyone who is a developer knows what SourceForge is, and if they don't, we can show them where it is, get them in contact with Sumpfork or Ras or whoever they're interested in working with and get on to finding more developers.
Our developers aren't our public relations people. Yes, we need them to come out during the conventions for public appearances, to take bows and receive their Nobel Awards when it is time, but for the most part, we need to not poke or prod them, for they get grumpy and code less when they are poked and prodded. From my time working at Adobe I know this to be very very very very true.
At the same time, we need liaisons to bring to the programmers good ideas from the community. Someone to condense all those crazy pie-in-the-sky ideas into concise bug reports and feature requests and to properly categorize them. (And I am not so good at this, so I should talk, but maybe I will get better, or maybe I will run away home when it has become apparent that I am doing less helping than I think I am.)
Anyway, you are right, we can use more developers, and I'm sure the developers we have know that very well. How to get those developers isn't easy, and it requires a lot of networking with people. This is not good use of our developers' time. If the forum at the BioWare site is cheese in the mousetrap for catching programmers, great, but once we have trapped them, then we have to give them a comfortable place to work, and maybe this is the most comfortable place to work for programmers?
I know, for me personally, I can't stand these forums! But I'm not a developer, and I expect they are not for me to like, but instead to make the developer's life more easy. (Thus the email alerts issue.)
Anyway, I will babble on for weeks if I don't stop. My point is, that each job has a tool that is appropriate for it, and we can't limit ourselves to just having one tool, unless it is some swiss-army knife kinda thing. But I knew this programmer once who would spit on a swiss-army knife and had this fancy leatherworker's tool and swore by it and then I read an article on SlashDot once and found out that very very few programmers like swiss-army knives, that they *all* use these leatherworker's tools. Shows how much I know.
Take that how you will.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
In an effort to increase our visibility within the Bioware community, I've taken the liberty of creating the OpenKnights Guild on the Bioware site.
I've sent out a slew of invites, however, for me to send you an invite, you have to already have a Bioware Guild/Registry profile. If you do not have one, you can either create one and let me know, or you can browse the guild list and request an invitation through the site.
Phantom: I wish to cast my vote of appreciation for your desire to raise the OK visibility. I'm sure that your efforts along with Byril's (who would probably appreciate an opportunity to collaborate with you on these outreach activities) can help us connect with other members of the NWN community, both future collaborators and users.
However, forgive me if I don't see the point for me in particular other than to give me *another* set of forums for me to monitor. (Lately I am hard pressed to get over to the For Devs on the BioBoards and that is arguably much more critical than an OK BW Guild). The sourceforge setup works pretty well. In particular I like being alerted to posts via e-mail (it combines the virtues of a forum with the immediacy of communication of a mail-list... one reason why we *don't* have a mail-list for OK). As you have said elsewhere, the SF boards represent a huge amount of "legacy" on the OK efforts. I would think it better for visibility to keep plugging at their existance rather than to try to replace/augment them.
I mean I will probably get around to accepting your invite to the Guild, the next time I'm on the Bioboards, but I just haven't had time lately just to get there. (Does that tell you something?) But I'm afraid that rather than raise our visibility, this might (inadvertently) end up dissipating and fracturing our effort. (This is similar to the whole IRC channel discussion. In moving to the NWConnections server, I will probably just *move* to that one, and not try to have a personal presence on both the old and new channels. That isn't to say that people might have a use for both... (e.g. linux support continues on the old one), but I won't have the time *myself* to be a part of both (to the extent that I am a part of either).
So unless the other key players start making important discussions on the Guild boards, I'll keep most of my commentary here. I might poke my nose in once in a while, maybe to direct people to *these* boards.
Now, this is not to say that Guild couldn't be useful at some level, in that it might give another way to route people to useful information (but isn't that what the tiki is for?) as well as allowing for alerts for OK announcements (activities, product releases, etc.) We could have some useful discussion of how the Guild could *augment* the SF and tiki material. (But let's have it here, eh? ;) ).
Ras,
It's all about traffic. One of the main reasons for having the guild is so that everyone else, users, developers, etc, *don't* have to check multiple places. Having the forums be at the guild allows people who are already checking the Bioware forums and reading the various threads to view the discussions between OK members without having to go elsewhere. Having the forums there allows people to more easily see OpenKnights as an active community, not a secretive cult.
OpenKnights has been hidden away on Sourceforge for far too long. It is great for hosting the releases and CVS repository. It hosts our website as well, which is great. But the forums here, useful as it has been for communicating with each other, has hurt us in terms of finding new people. In essence, you're asking them to do exactly what you're complaining you'd need to do to start posting in the OK Guild instead.
I do not agree with you at all that the forums are better off being here. When I found out that someone who is actually listed as a member of this project on Sourceforge thought the movement had stalled long ago, it re-inforced my belief.
I'm sorry if it makes life a little more difficult for you to peek in on the Guild forums every so often. Given that if you login to the site and go to the Guild, you should be able to tell which threads are new and which are not by whether the circle to the left is colored green, I don't see how this could be such a show stopper. If it makes it easier, threads can be made sticky as requested.
I would appreciate it if you do not try and direct people back to these boards. If that's the only reason you can find to visit the Guild forums, I would expressly request that you don't then. I am sorry that you cannot see the benefit in the forums being at the Guild. On this, we will have to agree to disagree, but I'm not going to stop pushing for the forums to remain at the Guild.
Having a Guild does not by itself help us "find new people". There are just too many other Guilds out there. What helps is visibility and posting in all the other places. (And that includes the various (nonGuild) Bioboards, and the Vault, and in other places on the net. So help out Byril, he could use a hand.)
And of course what helps the most is having something to post *about*, which means getting products out there. You think the Guild is a help. Fine. More power to you. I hear that sumpfork is posting on the Guild boards. Good for him. It's all about what enables the devs.
So are you recommending that we officially terminate using the SF boards? (BY the way, would you like to be made an OK admin so that your vote matters officially?) Have you found a way that I can get e-mail monitoring of the forum boards (the only way that I am honestly able to keep up on these puppies). Yes I know about the color coding... you miss the point, though, it is *another place* to go and check the color codings. I've got two already (Mac and For Dev and should probably look more on the linux board as well) and I get to them once ever two-three days. The SF boards get instant coverage.
If the group decides then I'll go (grumbling, and less affective unless you meet the technical challange).
I'm also sorry that you or others think that the current setup was a secretive cult. (That kind of hurt, by the way... I've been trying the best I knew how, but I've always considered the Open Knights, well.... Open.) Maybe its time for someone else to try to keep things cooking along.
Checked into the email notification issue on the Bioware forums. Unfortunately, the only time email notifications are available are when you're the one who started the topic.
For the record, the secretive cult was not my impression. I'm well aware of the meetings that have been going on, though I keep wandering into them on accident as opposed to being consciously aware of them. The first time I heard the term used was when one of the DLA guys lambasted us with regards to who would be maintaining Torlack's compiler. That stung quite a bit as my reply to him indicates even though I'm not a developer and my contributions to OK up to that point had been more related to floating ideas.
It would have been easy enough to blow him off as a pompous, ignorant blowhard given some of the stupidity in the rest of his post, but unfortunately discussions with a number of people in the wake of neveredit 0.4 being released and the Guild being opened made me re-think that particular piece.
OpenKnights does have a problem with its public perception, Ras. If new beta releases were coming out on a regular basis of the different OK projects, this wouldn't be an issue. The releases would speak for themselves.
But Ras, take a look at the CVS repositories for the different projects. Most of them haven't had a commit in months. The two that have, neveredit and NWNAutoUpdater, are for all intents and purposes being done by two people. While NWNAutoUpdater shouldn't need many more revisions other than to bug fix, what happens to neveredit if Sumpfork can't commit time to it for some reason? It's the most promising OK tool yet in terms of achieving the original goal, a Toolset alternative. It runs on all three platforms. It has quite a featureset already. And if something prevented Sumpfork from working on it, it would be dead in the water. That's a very chilling prospect. It's why I'm pushing so hard and will continue to do so.
This is not a shot at you, Ras. You've put in a hell of a lot of time into OpenKnights, running meetings, programming Manfred, answering forum posts. This is not about minimizing what's been done here. This is not about questioning leadership. It's about figuring out what to do next to help OpenKnights grow. We need more than one person working on each project. To do that, we need more devs than we currently have now.
You want to continue to hold discussions on Manfred, and whichever of the other tools you're the project lead on, here at the Sourceforge forums, then do so. It's your perogative. No one can force you to do otherwise. But let me ask you this.....how many people playing with the Mac Client even know of Manfred's existence or what the eventual goal is? And if they don't know, how can they possibly ever help?
I do have to say that the BioWare forums are more friendly to me than these are, but I'm not a developer and have never used SourceForge before this.
PhantomNJ, it sounds like you have more issues than just the forum, and that's okay, but I really think you (and I) should be working more with Byril and not bugging the developers as much as possible. (Unless you're a developer, and in which case, I should just shut up and go home now.) They know what they need far better than we know. If we go out and find more developers, we can send them here, or hook them up with other developers' BioWare private message names, or find a way for them to get in touch here (oh, there is a contact email address in each of our profiles).
The last thing we want to do is make things more difficult for programmers. Outreach people and groupies can do a great job of making contact with other organizations, we can take the *condensed* information from here and write it up and post it on the Guild Forum, but really, there is a lot of information here that I have no idea what it means, and I expect that most people don't except developers. And most anyone who is a developer knows what SourceForge is, and if they don't, we can show them where it is, get them in contact with Sumpfork or Ras or whoever they're interested in working with and get on to finding more developers.
Our developers aren't our public relations people. Yes, we need them to come out during the conventions for public appearances, to take bows and receive their Nobel Awards when it is time, but for the most part, we need to not poke or prod them, for they get grumpy and code less when they are poked and prodded. From my time working at Adobe I know this to be very very very very true.
At the same time, we need liaisons to bring to the programmers good ideas from the community. Someone to condense all those crazy pie-in-the-sky ideas into concise bug reports and feature requests and to properly categorize them. (And I am not so good at this, so I should talk, but maybe I will get better, or maybe I will run away home when it has become apparent that I am doing less helping than I think I am.)
Anyway, you are right, we can use more developers, and I'm sure the developers we have know that very well. How to get those developers isn't easy, and it requires a lot of networking with people. This is not good use of our developers' time. If the forum at the BioWare site is cheese in the mousetrap for catching programmers, great, but once we have trapped them, then we have to give them a comfortable place to work, and maybe this is the most comfortable place to work for programmers?
I know, for me personally, I can't stand these forums! But I'm not a developer, and I expect they are not for me to like, but instead to make the developer's life more easy. (Thus the email alerts issue.)
Anyway, I will babble on for weeks if I don't stop. My point is, that each job has a tool that is appropriate for it, and we can't limit ourselves to just having one tool, unless it is some swiss-army knife kinda thing. But I knew this programmer once who would spit on a swiss-army knife and had this fancy leatherworker's tool and swore by it and then I read an article on SlashDot once and found out that very very few programmers like swiss-army knives, that they *all* use these leatherworker's tools. Shows how much I know.
Take that how you will.