Posted by david.moore.ipg on November 7, 2011 at 1:15am
Why close most of the groups on commons.acquia.com and then create a group on groups.drupal.com? Is commons not worth using? This is crazy! Honestly, someone please explain to me the logic of this. The community that was using commons and sharing info to improve it seems to have shrunk dramatically as a result.
Comments
Hi David, The reason we
Hi David,
The reason we closed many groups to new members was so that we can provide better support to Commons users: Most discussion content, regardless of group, was about specific support requests and bug reports and went unanswered by Commons maintainers. Groups were also redundant (eg Commons Q&A and Commons FAQ), diluting useful content across the site.
By directing people to the Drupal.org issue queue, we are able to provide better assistance to Commons users and make it easier for users to get support.
Going forward, we will continue to use Commons.Acquia.com for more meta discussion topics like the Commons roadmap and announcements.
This is all part of a coordinated effort to increase community involvement and quality of support around Commons that is still under way.
By what measure do you see participation as having decreased? In fact, we've seen an increase in Drupal.org issue activity, despite the fact that existing Commons.Acquia.com group members can still create new content in closed groups for the time being.
measure
I understand the intent, but question the result.
I'm not looking for an online scuffle, but look at this thread as one example
http://commons.acquia.com/discussion/profile-pictures
There has been nothing like this happening on the issue queue and I get maybe one new notification from commons.acquia.com a week (if that) since the shutout. Look at this stream, http://commons.acquia.com/stream. Who would come back and give this product a second look? If someone hadn't disabled the /analytics on commons.acquia.com it would be visually obvious there.
And why put the interaction guide here instead on on commons.acquia.com if that is where meta discussions about the roadmap will be.
Maybe the issue queue works for bug reporting and code contributors, but for the rest of us trying to use, customize, and extend commons, it ain't workin like commons was workin. http://drupal.org/node/1327166
Maybe a few more people are contributing code towards commons and helping acquia carry the load--maybe--, but if you are sure this is an improvement who am I to say otherwise....
I tend to agree with ezra-g
I posted an issue on the Commons discussion site at http://commons.acquia.com/discussion/http-error-0 back in September, and have yet to get even a single response or comment. So I would tend to agree with ezra-g here.
Yes on bugs
I agree bug reports and installation issues belong on the issue queue.
As to your issue posted on commons, that is kind of my point. Nothing significant seems to be happening on commons.acquia.com anymore.
Maybe I am in the minority. So be it. Maybe commons not quite ready to be the information and collaboration platform it aspires to be. Where do I download the profile for groups.drupal.com?. I can add in the Project and Project Issue Tracking modules and wala, maybe I have something superior to commons.
commons.acquia.com is dead, and it's sad.
commons.acquia.com is dead, and it's sad. I certainly agree with Ezra that the structure of the site was very poor, with redundant groups. And having the issue queue of d.o be the single go-to for issues is a huge plus for the development team.
But why not whip commons.acquia.com into shape? Have a community manager actively manage the community: corral the groups and the posts into their proper place.
Contributing on d.o is for drupal power-users. The community at commons.acquia.com is filled with people new to drupal. What percentage have d.o accounts? I didn't until a couple weeks ago, and I started working with Commons 8 months ago. People at commons.acquia.com are engaging with each other and with the power users on comfortable turf. It's a better place for support, it's the place to test out and get acquainted with Commons, and I believe for these reasons it will be much more effective at improving everyone's experience with Commons.
For people evaluating the software, a vibrant community at commons.acquia.com should be a much better testament than a sales webinar. What's there now certainly reflects very poorly on the software. Considering the marketing push from Acquia, this is surprising.
The day the community died, in my opinion (though I'd love to see the analytics) was the day commons.acquia.com was 'upgraded' from 1.x to 2.x. If the daily digests were working, maybe this transition would have been successful. Alas, email digests not being sent. I had been receiving daily notifications of community activity, and felt connected to the community, but that ended abruptly on September 1. At least that's the date of the last email I received from commons.acquia.com. How many emails were sent to users before and after the switch? How many active subscriptions? Is it just me?
The page here currently shows 29165 users. I'm impressed - that seems to me like a pretty big constituency to be ignoring. (And when your number one user is an obvious spammer with twice as many points as Jay Batson, I feel secure saying this community is being ignored by its management.)
The solution? Manage the site! Use it! We need to cultivate community on the community site. A lot of support can happen there, and some can happen on the d.o issue queue. Commons has been designed with low barriers to participation to better engage a community - this is a huge asset commons.acquia.com has over d.o. Tons of support, discussions, and documentation will surface on commons.acquia.com organically, as it has in the past. This just won't happen on d.o. I see it as an escalation path, from commons.acquia.com to d.o. All bugs need to be on d.o, of course, and the developers can have their focus on the issue queue, but the much larger community of potential contributors can resume helping each other on the community site, where you don't need a d.o account, you don't need to know how to create issues, and so on.
Yes, it would be great if everything were in one place, but that hasn't succeeded. We need the sites to coexist, and we need a liaison to help manage issues. Acquia has dedicating lots very talented people to developing this product, which is fantastic. Thank you, Acquia! Their marketing machine is in high gear, yet the demo site is in shambles. It's an oversight I hope they'll remedy soon, but it's their site, so it's obviously their call what will happen with commons.acquia.com and all its potential.
Good point - some notification not happening
I had attributed the change to the shutdown of the groups on September 6th, but maybe it does have something to do with upgrade on the 1st and notifications. I spent a little time browsing around commons.acquia.com and there is a little more going on that shows up in my email notifications. I went from getting 6-15 notifications a day in August to maybe 1 or 2 or none from September forward. I think I used to get notifications for many more comments in groups where I was a member, but now I get some, but not all of them. This is not a digest issue, but a direct notifications issue.
I get notifications for some new content and comments, but not all of them by a long shot. Not sure I can discern a pattern.
I got no notifications for anything in this thread
http://commons.acquia.com/discussion/organic-groups-menu
but I did get others in the same timeframe.
community managers
Perhaps Acquia would consider reopening a few of the groups like
Customizing Commons
Usability and Design
Commons is designed to distribute the workload to community managers and content managers.
If Acquia cannot commit the resources to actively manage the site, perhaps some of us who are committed to supporting the commons community, but are not developers who submit patches, can volunteer for these roles in particular groups. I would be willing to do so for the long term benefit of the commons platform, but someone at Acquia would have to facilitate this.
Agreed
I initially found the Commons site to be a great way to explore the software before downloading. It also gave a great sense of how well thing work (or don't) when there are people actually using it.
I understand putting issues in queue on the Drupal site, but the community at Commons seems to be gone. I never use the site anymore. I can't even find reference to it on Acquia's marketing pages.
All excellent points here
I'm agreeing with many of your frustrations. One of my goals is to help whip commons.acquia.com back into shape. There's a lot we can do to make it better.
First off, what groups would you/did you use on commons.acquia.com? Please participate in this poll.
http://commons.acquia.com/poll/what-types-groups-would-help-you-get-more...
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