Hello fellow nixers,
This thread is about our first real self-assessment as a community.

Nixers has been alive since 2011 (though under different names), we've been through a lot and we've morphed into something quite different over the years.

This is the time to run a survey to see how we've done so far and in which direction we should go.

I've compiled an array of questions in a Google Form:

https://goo.gl/forms/HF0NVCw4BDUyLSIB3

For those who aren't friend with Google and still want to answer I can share the survey questionaire via PM.

Cheers!

Not much detail but I filled it out

Ah, I closed my tab and now I can't see the results anymore...

(23-07-2017, 12:36 PM)z3bra Wrote: Ah, I closed my tab and now I can't see the results anymore...

I'll do a summary of the survey in a week or two, don't worry about that.
Everything is going to be available (posted on our shiny new internal git or some other place).

there's some real gems in those responses. lel

/r/unixporn seems to be the gateway drug (it was for me)

(24-07-2017, 02:27 PM)evbo Wrote: /r/unixporn seems to be the gateway drug (it was for me)

Maybe because it's one of the rare places/communities where a lot of users can see the "nixers colors" being displayed.
I don't know a lot of others apart from our list of personal blogs and websites.

(24-07-2017, 05:06 PM)venam Wrote:

(24-07-2017, 02:27 PM)evbo Wrote: /r/unixporn seems to be the gateway drug (it was for me)

Maybe because it's one of the rare places/communities where a lot of users can see the "nixers colors" being displayed.
I don't know a lot of others apart from our list of personal blogs and websites.

That could be a great community challenge! Spreading our names in other communities (preferably not ricing involved, to meet different people)

We could try to get nixers' software projects into official distro and OS package repositories. This is a useful endeavour in and of itself but would also have the side effect of having people check out nixers.net if they want to see where the software came from, ask questions about it, contribute, etc.

I'm thinking about the window managers, cool utilities, ricing-related programs etc that members of the community have written. The best method of advocacy, IMO, is proving that your community (or at least members of the community) write good software.

It will be interesting to see the "personal projects" answers to the survey. Maybe we could just start going through those and, for those that want to participate, we could:

* Help the authors to clean up platform-specific code
* Try to build and use their software on many operating systems and architectures to find bugs, issues
* And finally, submit packages to Debian, Fedora, {Open,Free}BSD, pkgsrc, etc.

I can start doing this, but the only OS I have contributed to is OpenBSD, so I'll need help from the community to contribute to other operating systems. Also I don't even know how to contribute packages to most Linux distros.

Thoughts?

That's a pretty cool idea, pizzaroll1. I've been looking at ways to contribute to FreeBSD, and putting together some ports would be useful nixers outreach.

(24-07-2017, 08:49 PM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: We could try to get nixers' software projects into official distro and OS package repositories. This is a useful endeavour in and of itself but would also have the side effect of having people check out nixers.net if they want to see where the software came from, ask questions about it, contribute, etc.

(24-07-2017, 08:49 PM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: It will be interesting to see the "personal projects" answers to the survey. Maybe we could just start going through those and, for those that want to participate, we could:

It's a great idea considering that what most of what the users answered (so far) to what they want to see more on the forums was related to personal projects (what others are working on) and programming.

This could fill the gap and now that we've got a git platform running it's also possible.

The git repo currently exports all tagged releases to http://git.nixers.net/releases, so it's a good starting point to package softwares IMO.

Another way to promote the community would be to create our own CA, and signing certificates for people we REALLY trust, rather than people paying for that.
All nixers could then add this CA to their certificate file and browse a nixers approved web!

(25-07-2017, 03:26 AM)z3bra Wrote: Another way to promote the community would be to create our own CA, and signing certificates for people we REALLY trust, rather than people paying for that.
All nixers could then add this CA to their certificate file and browse a nixers approved web!

All in for some CA with some strong EC like Brainpool and company. It's still pretty new, so most browsers won't even support it, openssl only supports a small amount of curves so far. We could start incorporating those in one of those webkit based browser.

(25-07-2017, 04:04 AM)venam Wrote:

(25-07-2017, 03:26 AM)z3bra Wrote: Another way to promote the community would be to create our own CA, and signing certificates for people we REALLY trust, rather than people paying for that.
All nixers could then add this CA to their certificate file and browse a nixers approved web!

All in for some CA with some strong EC like Brainpool and company. It's still pretty new, so most browsers won't even support it, openssl only supports a small amount of curves so farm. We could start incorporating those in one of those webkit based browser.

Hahaha, I can tell that you're really into this new project of yours about elliptic curves :P
As we are not well-known, providing an unsupported CA will not help with the adoption though, so I'm not 100% sure it's the good way to go. To discuss.

(24-07-2017, 08:49 PM)pizzaroll1 Wrote: for those that want to participate, we could:

* Help the authors to clean up platform-specific code
* Try to build and use their software on many operating systems and architectures to find bugs, issues
* And finally, submit packages to Debian, Fedora, {Open,Free}BSD, pkgsrc, etc.

I think this sound like a really good idea. I'm biased since I could use some help with my project, but I'd definitely help others however I can.

(27-07-2017, 10:14 AM)Tmplt Wrote: I'm biased since I could use some help with my project, but I'd definitely help others however I can.

Go on share!

can i get the assessment through PM venam?

(27-07-2017, 03:14 PM)z3bra Wrote: Go on share!

Unless you're talking about something else, I already shared it in the Google form :P

We can't see the form results, unless we resubmit it

(28-07-2017, 01:32 PM)z3bra Wrote: We can't see the form results, unless we resubmit it

Patience, I'll write a summary of what has happened within the last years, and where we can aim, by the end of next week.

Be sure to submit your answer to the survey by that time if you haven't already.

(28-07-2017, 01:32 PM)z3bra Wrote: We can't see the form results, unless we resubmit it

Oh, in that case: http://git.nixers.net/bookwyrm/file/README.html

ah, I didn't realised you talked about this one ^^ I was expecting another project. Thanks for joining then!

(28-07-2017, 03:50 PM)Tmplt Wrote:

(28-07-2017, 01:32 PM)z3bra Wrote: We can't see the form results, unless we resubmit it

Oh, in that case: http://git.nixers.net/bookwyrm/file/README.html

I made something similar to search google scholar to get the bibtex reference: http://fraun.space/git/scripts/file/getBibtex.py.html . Yours is cool though!