WordPress Openness (was Re: [wp-hackers] UI development for 1.6)

[Matthew Mullenweg]

Joey B wrote:
> My first issue: if this is all open to discussion, then why have I
> barely seen any outside of this mailing list? I certainly haven't seen
> any official discussion on #wordpress, and I'm usually there. You also
> told us to keep our mouths shut at the June 15th meetup about 1.6 on
> the forums, so we can't discuss it there. The only place I've seen any
> reference to it is the wordpress meetups and the Codex request page
> and here-- three places where more than half of the "smart idea
> contributing" community have no idea where is. If it's meant to be
> open, than have something more open than half-closed.

There are appropiate forums for different things, to summarize:

* Forums - for support of released final versions
* IRC - for chatting at socializing
* wp-hackers - for discussing development and future versions
* wp-testers - for testers of SVN versions to discuss bugs and such
* wp-docs - documentation
* trac - for bugs
* Codex - for information edited and written for posterity

> Secondly, how do you read IRC discussions when you are rarely in
> #wordpress yourself, Matt? Several good ideas pass through there on a
> weekly, even daily, basis, yet I rarely see an "official
> representative" of WordPress there to see these discussions. From our
> previous private discussions, I think you see #wordpress as nothing
> but a place to shrug off support questions to those technically-savvy
> enough to run an IRC client, but it's much more than that, and I think
> someone involved with Wordpress' codebase should be there from
> time-to-time to actually see these discussions.

I read the logs, like I'm sure several others do. I can't stay in IRC 
all the time because it kills my productivity and is very distracting. I 
don't encourage people needing support to go to IRC, I prefer all 
support and people doing support in the forums. I see other developer 
nicks idling there all the time, maybe you don't recognize them?

Chat can be a great enabler for getting things done, but you can't 
expect people to be on it 24 hours a day. That's why we have a set time 
every week set aside for people to get together and collaborate. (The 
IRC meetups.)

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com