[CentOS-devel] CentOS-devel Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

Sat Jul 9 21:30:45 UTC 2011
Yury V. Zaytsev <yury at shurup.com>

Hi KB,

On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 20:29 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:

> Where would you have looked to see this being communicated ?

1) A new thread on this list containing the statement of the fact and
brief explanation.

2) A short message on the Twitter, which many are using as an RSS feed
for the project news for the lack of better options.

> What did you find when you looked there ?

1) Your reply on the mailing list made perfect sense and was generally
an example of good communication, but it came late.

2) So did the tweet.

> What else would you have expected ?

As on many other instances, I would expect this information to be
provided earlier.

> How can you help with this communcation ?

How can you accept help with the communication if you need any?

I have previously asked on this list if the batches of the relevant
qaweb announcements can be communicated on the -devel list weekly, e.g.
every Friday. 

Not only this didn't happen (and I didn't get any feedback with regards
to this question), but also the qaweb pages ended up only being updated
sporadically after the status update requests were posted to the list.
Later, I e-mailed Jeff privately, but apparently he was too busy to get
back to me. 

I really do believe, that how communication happens does matter, and
although the relevant information ends up being communicated when
requested, I think that nobody would argue that there is a trend of it
happening late if at all.

I could have taken the role of a person that would compile relevant
updates from qaweb and officially post them to the list if this would be
of any help to you, but obviously it's probably much more appropriate if
this were done by someone who has something to do with CentOS
development or at least QA and has some insight into what's actually
going on there.

I've seen Alain re-posting information to the announcement threads on
the forum and I think that he was doing a great and important job. If
only there was a designated person to regularly and timely post updates
to all major communications channels (forums, list, twitter), this would
have taken care of most of the problems.

I'd like to refer to ReactOS as an example of being good in
communication. I'm not involved with this project in any way, but they
post very nice newsletters every two weeks and it makes it easy and
pleasant to follow on their progress.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev