There's a growing feeling among the Gentoo users that we'd like some small, simple means of communication of project status, ways to help, etc. from the developers. People feel isolated, and that's bred frustration at times. Here's the most recent (and most productive) thread on the topic; lots of ideas and discourse: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=22308&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 Luke Maurer (a.k.a. Jyrinx) maurerl@carleton.edu (or jyrinx@mindspring.com)
Update the front page of www.gentoo.org more often. That would be my solution. The Gentoo webpage is the first viewable face to the community. While the site reorganization is going well, what we are still lacking is NEW news... although every single day, there is work done in the trenches of /usr/portage and beyond. For example, when evolution 1.2 eventually makes it into portage, that would be something worthy of front page news (in my opinion). Be it in the form of a news post or as on story in something like the Wine Weekly News (see www.winehq.com) Good? Bad? Should I crawl back into my hole?
I think that the front page updates are essential as well, and I think it's one of the main reasons we are using a new style setup now, to make things easier. Am also anxious to get ports pages going, would be nice to have one for each arch to post the arch specific news, etc. (which I think is in the works). The main/ports pages are our most prominent point of contact from devs to users and we under use the main page right now, but I think a lot of it can be attributed to the fact that we are so busy working on Gentoo stuffs that there has been no time to post things :) Has anyone considered some sort of submission system for users/devs to submit gentoo 'news' yet? Would be a great step towards more community involvement I think. Just my $0.02 :)
regarding the news&submit system ... i did something like that some time ago .. maybe it can be used here too.. greetings
Communication should improve dramatically with the release of the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. (first issue scheduled for 12/23) The main purpose of the GWN is to improve communcations between the development and user communities. The GWN will monitor most communication channels in the Gentoo project (mailing list, forums, gentoo-core, IRC, etc.) and summarize key issues on a weekly basis. Additionally, I've volunteered to act as a coordinator for user/developer relations, so if there are other bugs lurking out there similar to this one, feel free to assign them to me.
gwn should resolve most/all of these issues. closing bug.
