Let me take this one step further and state that the entire linux-sound.org database has been ported over into apps.linuxaudio.org with full user access to maintaining/altering the content which makes linux-sound maintenance unnecessary (esp. since Dave has effectively decided not to keep it up to date as often as he would like to). I think it would be nice if we all put efforts towards a common goal, especially since linuxaudio.org is all about the community. If there is an aspect of the lao domain you don't like, you are more than welcome to contribute... That being said, as always, we continue to be in dire need of assistance/support in making linuxaudio.org better. This is why I perceive the fragmentation of community resources to be moving us farther away from the place where we ought to be and where the consolidated online presence would be truly useful and meaningful to a community as small as ours. Best wishes, Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A. Director, Linuxaudio.org Virginia Tech Dept. of Music - 0240 Blacksburg, VA 24061 (540) 231-6139 (540) 231-5034 (fax) ico(a)linuxaudio.org www.linuxadio.org

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 3:10 PM, schoappied <schoappied(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think that's a good idea... even a link right on the main page that says something like "New? Please click here to get started" that links to basic info... I like how this site organizes its information, as an online handbook (for stop motion animation): http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/handbook/ And it links specific parts of the handbook to relevant discussions in the forum. I guess we should put our money where our mouths and volunteer to help out... :-P -- Brett ------------------------------------------------------------ "In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden; If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world." -- Jelaleddin Rumi

While I appreciate your thoughts on this matter, the keyword here is "we" as in community, not "I" as in my personal tastes. In other words, while some (many?) of us may not care much for forums, others may, including newbies--see Ubuntu forums for instance. Lao site has addition of forums on the long-term roadmap, so I think having this as part of lao is something I would very much like to encourage. Best wishes, Ico

Sorry about top posting but that seems to be accepted in this thread. One thing I hope folks **never** do here is what they did recently on the Wine-Users list where they created a forum and then linked Wine-Users email list to the forum. Now when people post in the forum all of that shows up on wine-users and anything in wine-users is posted back into the forum. What a mess! Forum postings don't need to keep any context since you can look at the post just above it. This means you start seeing emails that say things like "Yes" and nothing else. What a mess! It got so bad I quit wine-users after being a subscriber for probably 6 years. Personally I like the immediacy of an email list but I like reading forums more than gossemer threads, etc., when I want to study some subject I don't know much about. - Mark On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Thomas Vecchione <seablaede(a)gmail.com> wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 schoappied schrieb: I back that: a forum is nice in many cases, you can have pictures, a powerful search-function etc. PLUS: the site in question is indeed a forum only so it can serve a a forum-module for the 2 other sites. best regards HZN

Arthur wrote: C'mon, I've heard you're a 10! ;-) That's the fault of the mailing list, not Google. Any mailing list that is shutting out the most-used web search engine is not serious about sharing its contributions with others. They're not handy enough that I'll sign up for a forum just so I can search their contents. The only way the two different ways of communicating work together is if the two are bridged together, so that posts to one automatically show up in the other. In the past, this has always led to massive amounts of spam poisoning the email list unless some list/forum manager is working full time at keeping it out. Many lists and forums have been killed by such junk, just as their older brother (newsgroups) were killed before them. Forums - bah! -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Am Montag, 14. April 2008 schrieb Arthur: <snip> Apart from the discussions forms-vs-mailinglist: Stop that f*** html mails! HTML is something for web-pages (and maybe forums), it is totally irrelevant for text-messages like email. And if you can't keep away from html-mails, at least use a mail app that also adds your content as plain-text without that freaking formating. Arnold -- visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/ --- Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me to all your contacts. After a month or so log in as root and do a "rm -rf /". Or ask your administrator to do so...

Dang reply-to-all.... Sorry about the double post you will be getting Dirk- Re: Christian's Einfeldt Post- It a very good post about the politics and the changing ground surrounding the open source movement, on occasion. My personal belief is that a seperate, but helping, movement is best, much in the way that development on open source libraries by different people helps multiple projects, I am a believer that the same can be applied to getting information disseminated. That is why earlier I had mentioned wanting to see tie ins to individual project forums hosted on their own site. It prevents a duplication of the same questions on multiple different sites by allowing the one material to be seen by many. Re: Google's representation of mailing lists and forums searches- Ok what happens when I type in something that has been answered on, even this mailing list, into Google? I get one maybe two replies back on a search page to be honest, unless I am specifying this list in particular where I think in that case I get more. I get a link that says, show similar pages. In all honesty, I don't think I am alone in that if the summary of those two replies, or even the posts themselves more often than not, don't show information useful to what I am looking for, I keep looking through google search results. To be honest more often than not, if I am googling something, I get more useful information from forums and to some extent wikis in Google's search results. Sure they may be great places to post up pictures of cats and cheesburgers, but they are also still decent places to get assistance as can be proven by Ubuntu Forums for example. I moderate one site that has a section on LInux in general(As well as their A/V editing sections and Apple sections). I post on another site that is specific to audio and has a linux section. I know others here do as well because I run into some of them on those sites. In both of those forums I have helped personally, lots of people get started in Linux, and have seen many more. They can certainly be used for troubleshooting and many people would prefer that than dealing with mailing lists, and especially mailing lists where their email is made public on most every post they make for mining algorithms to send tons of spam. I get several hundred spam messages a day to this email that I use for public postings right now, I can certianly understand that feeling. I also have decent filtering via gmail, and had Thunderbird doing it before that. I can't guarantee everyone does that. So yes I think there is something to be said still for forums in the troubleshooting process. In as far as needing to sign up to search, that is something that depends on the site. Even so, so long as the site is publicly viewable, Google(And other search engines) will likely still index it, and thus it will turn up in search results there. When people are looking for a specific answer to a question, chances are they are going to google first, and thus get introduced to the forum like that. Also often times i have seen several people that after finding repeated answers in one spot, then join the forum to ask a question they couldn't find an answer to. Again I suggest joining a mailing list to them and they don't respond to favorably to it. To each their own, choice is at least as much a strength as it is a weakness in the open source world. Seablade

Hi, I have been lurking on this list for sometime, and I appreciate the educated, informed posts here. The question of one centralized repository for all knowledge relating to Linux versus the merits of letting 10,000 flowers bloom is a very deep issue that our DTP community has been exploring in video through the Digital Tipping Point video project. I don't have any answers, and IMHO, there probably are no answers, as this might well be one of the profound, unsolveable questions of humanity: order and stability leading potentially to tyranny and stagnation versus diversity and creativity leading potentially to chaos and wasted resources. A long, long time ago, in the mid 1600s, Thomas Hobbes wrote a treatise called Leviathan that still poses questions central to our discussion here. Thomas Hobbes basically was upset by the English Civil War, which broke out in 1642. There was much strife and chaos as a result of the war, and in part as a result of what he saw as the horrors of that war, Hobbes wrote that no civil society is possible unless all citizens surrender their independence to a strong central authority, a Leviathan. He felt that the rabble could not govern itself. His most famous quote is that without a central authority, human lives would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes#Leviathan You could call Steve Ballmer a neo-Hobbesian, because he said that FOSS cannot succeed because it lacks a "center of gravity." Those words are especially eerie when you lay them down alongside Thommy Hobbes' call for a surrender of autonomy. Ballmer is basically saying that we, the FOSS rabble, cannot govern ourselves. We must prove him wrong. The Roman Empire imposed a tense peace on the world by virtue of their military dominance, and likewise, Microsoft, like IBM before it, has imposed certain standards on the computing industry. Now is the time for us as a global community to evolve out of the Pax Romana that Microsoft has imposed on the computing world. If we lack structure, we will not be able to mount an concerted effort to break the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop. On the other hand, our community is unlikely to tolerate another monopolist like Microsoft, and so some of us tend to criticize popular distros like Ubuntu as seeking to claim too much power. We _must_ sort out these issues, and achieve the right balance between chaos and tyranny. I believe that one of the truly remarkable things about FOSS is that it will be one trend that will help the entire human family learn how to balance democracy and stability. The particular question at hand is whether to start a new forum at linuxmusicians.com , or whether to stay with the venerable linuxaudio.org. I am too new to this list to suggest the correct answer, and I don't pretend to know the answer. But I do know that each of us should privately ask ourselves what we can do to move the whole community forward, even if it is maybe a short term inconvenience to ourselves. One thing is clear to me; we must keep our discourse civil. For example, we cannot call Miguel de Icaza a "Microsoft shill" merely because he praised OOXML as a "superb standard." I personally think that Miguel should have used his considerable influence to improve ODF, but still, we must not descend into name-calling. We must resolve the issue of GPL2 and GPL3 for the GNU and Linux kernel projects respectively. We should refrain from bitterly criticizing the open source folks if we prefer to call it "Free Software", and vice versa; we should not bitterly criticize Stallman for insisting that we call it GNU/Linux, even if we do consider him to be too strident in his tone. Our success will come down to our ability to collaborate. Microsoft has tons of money and a rigid command-and-control structure. If we are to succeed, we must strive for cohesiveness while preserving our diversity. ---- Christian Einfeldt, Producer, The Digital Tipping Point

Dave Phillips wrote: could be a argument for a central forum... for more specific app related questions you can off course go to the app related forum. There are 42 registered users now... time will tell... About the links and descriptions. On the dutch ubuntu forum I come too, there is a forum which is the core of the community. On the forum are links to the ubuntu website and back. Also there's a link to 'official documentation' from the forum to the doc and back... I think it should be possible to manage something like this for linuxaudio.org. A linuxaudio.org with links to the documentation, apps, members, and the forum. And on the forum links to linuxaudio.org and the 'official linuxaudio.org documentation'. On the forum there can be possiblities for short how-to's which can eventually be seen as 'documentation-testing' eg. if someone wrights a great how-to he can be ask to write a official documentation about it for example. I think such a organization can be a boost to linuxaudio(.org)! as I said, couldn't a forum be such a channel? I as a relative newbie, has learned a lot of your articles! :) It was for me a sort of documentation... maybe cause I didn't find out the pages behind 'portal' on the linuxaudio.org quickly enough ;)

I think this is also the greatest ailment of the Linux audio community. Perhaps it stems from the fact that everyone is excited about the 2% inspiration new project offers but is taken aback when the first 2% finally disappear and one is left with 98% perspiration. Such projects never go past the 0.3 version and eventually join the endless ranks of "potentially really cool but totally buggy and unfinished" software tools. This is why I've been lobbying hard to get all the online resources into one place. That's why we have apps.linuxaudio.org docs.linuxaudio.org lists.linuxaudio.org etc. (yes some of these are placeholders waiting for users to contribute). We need more perspiration than inspiration at this point as that will be the only thing that will bring us closer to some of the noble goals mentioned here. ico

I certainly agree some consolidation could be a good thing. What I am wondering about though, is the possibility of truly using the linuxaudio.org as a portal. In order to do this I think several things would be needed from my standpoint.... See http://portal.linuxaudio.org <http://portal.linuxaudio.org/> 1. A centralized basic information about all applications (wiki already in existance, good start) http://apps.linuxaudio.org <http://apps.linuxaudio.org/> has all apps that have been a part of Dave's website. They can be also sorted according to jack/ladspa/whatever support and entries are open to community contributions. There were a number of people here very vocal how they would not contribute to a wiki that was password protected. Well, it hasn been open access since its introduction little over a year ago, yet we had little or no contributions since. It would be nice if we would be as determined about our contributions as we are about our preferences, no? 2. A centralized repository of general linux audio information(ie What is realtime, why/when should you use it, FAQs etc.) http://lowlatency.linuxaudio.org/ (yes, it could be much better, volunteers are always welcome) 3. A centralized place to go for announcements from all projects at once... http://lists.linuxaudio.org <http://lists.linuxaudio.org/> we are hoping to also implement forum.linuxaudio.org - This would likely entail using a RSS feeds for all members of the linuxaudio consortium, and subscribing to those feeds to be displayed on the news page. I am sure there is a better way, but this is what sticks out to me at the moment, filtering of the announcements might be necessary. I suppose another option would be to utilize the linux-audio-announce mailing list instead so as to have a natural filter preventing things like general informational posts. Linuxaudio.org main page has RSS feeds. 4. I am not against a centralized forum either, however I think app specific forums and websites are still a good thing, which leads to the next point couple of points... 5. Tight integration between all of the above. On the wiki we have links to the forums for those peices of software, or from the FAQ/Info sections links to the forums, or from the Forums to the wikis, with the news announcements a link to the wiki for the software the announcement is about, etc. This is in progress but again, most of the work you've seen so far has been the fruit of maybe half-dozen people including myself. 6. A single login for linuxaudio... And I don't just mean linuxaudio.org, but all member projects if possible. This is the one most difficult to implement, and probably most contreversial, but would allay some of the problems that Dave and others have, which is having to sign up for hundreds of forums with logins to remember etc. Having one place to go for that would be great. This could tie into the centralized forums, by having direct links to each of the projects individual forums, if applicable, and auto-login. OpenID is making good strides in this area, but as I mentioned I do expect this to be the most contreversial of my suggestions I suppose, along with still being the most difficult to implement. See above. Some users complain about having to log in so we left it open for the sake of greatest possible target audience. Best wishes, ico But the goal with these would be to provide a single portal, from which you can get all levels of help by utilizing all the availiable resources out there. Seablade

Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: Ah that's new for me! I posted some questions and suggestions on the list, but didn't receive much reaction... Maybe it is possible to change www.linuxmusicians.com to forum.linuxaudio.org... Then you have already members and a moderator ;) And you don't have two such forums... But this is something you should discuss with 'nathan' the forum boss.... I'm just a 'user' .... Dirk

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:26:49 -0400 "Ivica Ico Bukvic" &lt;ico(a)vt.edu&gt; wrote: What I think would be a good idea is not to centralise anything as such but to have a central place to go for directions and information, call it signpost, call it portal, call it whatever you want. One criteria it would need to fulfil is to be up-to-date, another to offer a real overview, a third to be well structured. It would require quite some and constant work to reflect the real situation, outdated and wrong information would only be misleading (once it is established, that is). I guess that some people would be needed to do this job, a team of people who are willing to invest a considerable amount of time and effort, not just for a brief period but in the long run. Else, I don't really see hope for that. On the matter of a forum: I used those for quite some time, but pretty much stopped doing so when I got more and more into Linux audio. I don't really know why, but I can't stand them any more. It is hard for me to find valuable information an a forum and asking to get information is more cumbersome than on IRC or a mailing-list. A mailing list is a far more standard-way of communication and more accessible in many ways, everybody, including people without eyesight, like Julien, can access it. That's something that is impossible with a forum, to my knowledge at least. What I wish for a mailing-list like this a good way to search it, placed so that everyone can easily find and use it, to avoid unnecessary repetitions as far as possible. From my experience it is a very common and big problem of fora that people are asking the same questions over and over again, and knowledgeable people get tired of answering and/or redirecting. IRC and mailing-lists may have the same problem, but it appears to be not as big a problem. The key to solve that may be a good wiki or something like that, where people write something down once, instead of answering a hundred times. A good and active wiki, in combination with a good mailing-list search placed at a prominent position may provide the informational backbone. A forum may be an addition to it, but I personally would like to have the vast majority of information on the wiki and the list. The wiki has the sign-up-problem as well, for contributions at least, and I don't know how to get rid of that barrier. When writing the above, I had mostly the technical aspects in mind. I can well imagine a forum as a place for more musical and community related communications. A place for communications of a low priority from a technical point of view, where it is possible to talk on a more personal level because you don't disturb anybody. I guess that's the one good thing about fora, communication that would be considered inappropriate on a list could be fine there, under the premise that important information is present and easily accessible elsewhere. It is all just from my limited experience, and it's just how I imagine that it could work, and I think it could. What it would require is a lot of constant work from a bunch of people with different expertise. It may well be that I was unclear on some points, please don't hesitate to ask. What is imagined, described, and understood may well be apart a lot. It would be nice if it all came true, let's see who makes it happen. Best Regards, Philipp