Subject: what our users want in 1.0 ... one data point
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 12:10:50 CDT
As anyone who's subscribed to both lists is (painfully) well-aware, there
are many, many differences between the following two lists:
abiword-dev@abisource.com
abiword-user@abisource.com
Of course, there's some partial overlap in the membership of both lists --
for example, many key developers are also on the user list -- but for the
most part they're two different communities:
200+ folks on abiword-dev
~400 folks on abiword-user
Those differences are, by and large, a very Good Thing.
We're high-traffic on this list, and willing to go as deep as needed on any
technical detail, no matter where it is (or isn't yet) in the code. We're
determined to figure out how to make all kinds of stuff Just Work, with an
especially strong focus on those features that someone's ready and willing
to step up and implement now.
By contrast, traffic on the user list is much lighter, and tends to focus on
much more pragmatic issues. Those folks all *use* AbiWord, and are swapping
tips and ideas on how they can help each other use it even better. They're
focused on the experience of *using* our software instead of creating it,
which is a tremendously valuable perspective for us. Plus which, they're
almost unfailingly positive when they make suggestions -- many of which are
very well-thought-out and clearly explained.
Thus, I was especially gratified to find the following thread spawned
yesterday on the user list:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-user/01/May/0015.html
There's not a lot there yet, but it's been really nice to see how productive
a discussion they're having. I encourage anyone who needs a break from our
current hot-and-heavy debates here to go over and read up on how some of our
*existing* users approach these issues.
However, before you do so, one simple request.
Please, please, please resist the temptation to migrate any of our existing
discussions from this list to the user list. As we've proven already,
there's already more than enough hot-and-heavy advocacy going on here. :-)
Polluting their discussion would be a terrible thing, because what we really
want are *their* unbiased and unfiltered opinions.
Enjoy!
Paul
PS: My secret hope is that while everyone's off reading what real users
think, I can get caught up on all our open "topic" threads and see whether I
have anything to add. ;-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:01 CDT