Hi Michael, [reordered for the sake of a linear argument]
Michael Weghorn wrote: > and I remember that the importance of users was emphasized at some in-person > event I attended (probably Akademy) as well. > And I would agree. A user-facing project (opensource or not) that doesn't care about users in the aggregate is probably doing something wrong. > Just to mention it, the KDE Code of Conduct contains this: > > > Our community is made up of several groups of individuals and > > organizations which can roughly be divided into two groups: > > > > * Contributors, or those who add value to the project through > > improving KDE software and its services > > * Users, or those who add value to the project through their > > support as consumers of KDE software > I'm not sure KDE would have a fundamentally different view here, but happy to have that conversation & perhaps hear new, fresh perspectives. For a code of conduct, it makes of course sense to include users (conduct is about interactions), so if contributors interact with users, ground rules of kind behaviour should apply. To clarify what I mean (and why I think KDE's take is not so different), the KDE manifesto [1] has this: * End-User Focus to ensure our work is useful to all people I'm perfectly in-line with that mission statement, as a guiding principle. But I would not turn down a contribution because it doesn't meet that standard yet (and instead try mentoring and other ways to improve it over time). I would, though, dismiss user requests that don't meet community norms, and not bother mentoring everyone until they understand. For perspective: it is not a scalable task to care for 200 million users individually. It is though a priority for me (and I hope achievable), to care for all our contributors, individually. Thus, mentoring existing, and attracting new contributors will always have a higher priority to me, than fixing end-user bugs (with project resources). Of course, there's nuance. The areas you and others have mentioned, that would need special attention, are worth tackling. > Of course, one could try to make a distinction between users that > contribute something back and those who do not, but I don't know > whether that would be particularly helpful, or even easy. (E.g. is > a user that only uses the software for themselves not part of the > community, but one who recommends it to others is, because they > "spread the word"? - And maybe one of those starts getting active in > some "official" area in the LibreOffice project, or migrates their > company from a proprietary office suite to an LTS version from an > ecosystem company,...) > Perhaps it's a different meaning I ascribe to the term 'user' in this discussion. The moment someone starts contributing to the project, this person becomes a contributor to me (in contrast to a mere anonymous user). Let's gloss over grey areas, as in, when does a contribution start to 'count' - I think it doesn't matter for this discussion (and surely there's different yardsticks anyway for that, between TDF sub-projects considering someone to have merit, over to how the MC evaluates contribution). So yes, from your list, it would be a distinction to me. [1] https://manifesto.kde.org/ Best, -- Thorsten
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