[Mageia-discuss] How about launching "Mageia working parties"?

[Juergen Harms]

Another idea triggered by watching the discussions on Mageia-discuss -
immediately triggered by "Install Mageia from Windows", but also by the 
observation that Mageia-discuss" is a very noisy mixture of highly 
specialised discussions and general considerations (a similar reflection 
may also pertain to high-level forums).

My suggestion addresses topics that pop up from an original observation, 
have several +1 comments, and then trigger a discussion on details + 
require work to be done; but only sum few involved people participate in 
this follow-up ("noise" for most everybody else). I do not think that 
such a working party is a good general concept for "noise-reduction" in 
discussion list or a forum - but I think that it may be a valuable 
concept once such a discussion involves work and requires some people to 
roll up their shirt sleeves in a somewhat organised way.

I think that the "Install Mageia from Windows" issue is a typical 
example for what could be very efficiently dealt with by a small ad-hoc 
working party - some few people who elaborate the issue in a - 
temporarily private - discussion, but than bring the results (or reason 
why there are no results) back to the list (the forum). That would be in 
complement to the Mageia teams - which address a far broader list of 
tasks (Install Mageia from Windows also illustrates that such a topic 
might cross the border of Mageia teams - some added value to the idea of 
a working party). And, I think, working this way may be fun.

Some embroidery around how such working parties might work:
- their principal aim should be to work out concepts / proposals that 
improve the end-user value of Mageia;
- their work should be complementary to what the established Mageia 
structures do (Mageia teams, the cooker-follow-up, etc);
- they should be self-organised (off-load work from the established 
structures; in one extreme using a private mailing list for 
communication, in the other extreme use a temporarily maintained sub-forum)
- they should work under the umbrella of Mageia (the work should in 
relation to topics raised in Mageia mailing lists and forums, Mageia 
should be kept informed; Mageia might formulate some general guidelines 
to be respected in order to accept the working party under the label of 
Mageia).

The immediate answer to my suggestion will probably be "why dont you?": 
I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Windows and migration from 
windows.

Maybe I am proposing a solution for a once-only problem - than throw it 
away. But I think there are other topics where such working parties 
could generate profitable (to Mageia) results, maybe even ideas for 
topics might be triggered once the concept exists.

I think that this is something where a "community distro" has some trump 
cards to play.