OpenKollab

Group: http://groups.google.com/group/openkollab/topics

• Collaboration between Linux communities [1 Update]
• another unique social venture finance model [1 Update]
• An Update of a More Personal Nature [2 Updates]
• One Connection Between Gaming and the Real World [1 Update]

Chris Watkins <chriswaterguy@appropedia.org> Apr 12 01:15PM +1000 ^


 
I'm not a coder, but I'm a user of Linux and its associated tools, from GNU,
GNOME, LXDE, KDE, CrunchBang and other communities.
 
What I see is that
 
– different communities often don't communicate much. The most obvious
case is where changes to a downstream package don't get pushed upstream
(e.g. from Ubuntu to Debian… of course there are always two sides to the
story).
– different tools to serve the same purpose are often developed by
different communities.
– In some cases (notably LXDE) there is a philosophy of being modular and
very lean, so anyone using any distro of Linux (maybe even any POSIX OS?)
can use their components.
– In other cases, you need to install a bunch of stuff (e.g. about
30MB just for icons, and a bunch of other stuff, just so I can
use one app
from KDE, "Basket," which I find indispensable.)
– there are potentially great tools that have little visibility, and
so development stalls
 
My own effort to help out is with the Lightweight Linux
Network<http://www.appropedia.org/Lightweight_Linux_Network>- perhaps
misnamed, as it's not meant to be yet another community or
network, but just some tools to help Linux people be aware of what's out
there:
 
– A place to ask about and suggest lightweight Linux components, on the
lightlinux <http://identi.ca/group/lightlinux>
<http://identi.ca/group/lightlinux>group
on Identica. Being on an open platform, many more people can respond than
actually belong to the group. (Twitter cannot be as useful, as it doesn't
have persistent records, and Identica has a far more tech-oriented
community.)
– A mailing list people can use to make contact. (No one has, but it's
there.)
– Wiki pages: home page Lightweight Linux
Network<http://www.appropedia.org/Lightweight_Linux_Network>and (most
important) an index of packages: Lightweight
Linux software <http://www.appropedia.org/Lightweight_Linux_software>.
 
Are there any immediate steps that can make this more useful? Encouraging
semantic tagging springs to mind – some sort of "rel=lightlinux" meta tag
for the project pages of Linux packages? (To keep the peace we'd need to
have lightgnulinux as identical in practice – is that something that is
handled by the query structure when using a search engine?)