Communication channels
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Contents |
Introduction
Similar to many other open source projects, Openbravo has a set of communication channels to cover different participants and community needs.
The recommended usage of these channels are as follow:
- Weblogs and Planet: To communicate with the Openbravo community, other communities, and journalists regarding progress made with in Openbravo projects.
- Mailing lists: For coordinating Openbravo development. Useful to stay updated with the latest news in Openbravo development.
- Web based on-line forums. To communicate with community members in order to discuss Openbravo features, configuration and installation issues.
- Chat channels: For real time communication, short questions, coordination (like our Chat meetings) and to quickly communicate with Openbravo community.
These channels are maintained by Openbravo and a community of volunteers. Do not expect commercial support when you ask for help. If you can contribute your experience, please do not hesitate to do it. Even if an answer is incomplete, it's a start.
General recommendations for written communication
These are some general recommendations for written communication:
- Is it appropriate for your audience?
- Do you provide enough context and information (e.g. product version, OS, etc)?
- What do you want to communicate?
- Structure your writing.
- Try to find sources and data (links) that defend your points.
- Avoid unnecessary criticism.
- Keep in mind: Some journalists may quote you as a project source!
Openbravo issues
Openbravo issues is a database of bugs and feature requests for Openbravo projects. It helps developers keep track of issues and who is fixing them.
If you have found a bug or you want to request a feature enhancement a issue report is the way to bring the attention to the Openbravo community.
Openbravo weblogs and Planet
Planet Openbravo is a window into the world, work and lives of Openbravo developers and contributors that acts as a aggregator of the different personal weblogs of every individuals.
Policy for including blogs to the Openbravo Planet
These are the requirements that a blog must have to be added to Openbravo Planet:
- Maintain an interesting blog about Openbravo ERP or POS projects.
- We welcome also contributors of related projects as far as they have a focus on Openbravo and its context.
- You should create an 'openbravo' tag if you are writing about other topics in your blog, so you can provide an Openbravo only feed.
- As for today the entries must be in English. We will provide infrastructure for holding another languages if a minimum of three blogs show interest following a structure similar to PlanetBeans.
- You are not allowed to put banners in your feed.
If you have interested in getting your blog added to our Planet please contact Fenzik (newcontent at openbravo dot com).
Blogging recommendations
What to blog about
- Conferences, tradeshows, round tables where Openbravo ERP and POS projects are involved
- Architecture decisions
- Product features that we are developing
- Success Openbravo stories
- Open source business
- Interesting Openbravo review articles
- If your blog mixes personal and Openbravo-related posts, use tags and have a feed showing only the Openbravo-related posts aggregated on the planet
- Openbravo-staff making both personal and professional posts that are Openbravo-related should maintain separate blogs for these to avoid confusion
Rules when blogging at Openbravo
- Use English
- Your public is smart and informed
- Think of what you want to say before writing it
- Structure your writing
- Be aware of intellectual property issues
- Link your sources
- Recognize people that have helped to build your ideas
- There is no such thing as hiding in the Internet
Mailing lists
Openbravo ERP project current has some mailing lists at SourceForge to coordinate the project development efforts.
openbravo-builds
URL: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=openbravo-builds
Traffic: High (approximately 40 messages per week)
We test our builds continuously in our build farm. This mailing list receives notifications when a build is broken or if later on it's fixed.
This is a good resource for people developing Openbravo or willing to follow its development closely. It's specially useful for those developers with push access to the repository.
openbravo-commits
URL: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=openbravo-commits
Traffic: High (approximately 30 messages per week)
Every push to the development Mercurial repositories generates an email to this list showing the changesets, their authors, the dates, what files and directories changed, and how they changed.
Aside from the obvious technical benefits of peer review, very common in open source projects, commit emails help create a sense of community, because they establish a shared environment in which people can react to events (commits) that they know are visible to others as well.
This is a good resource for people developing Openbravo or willing to follow its development closely.
openbravo-development
URL: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=openbravo-development
Traffic: Expected to be high
This a general development discussion list about how to develop using Openbravo.
Archives
Openbravo mailing list archives are collected on SourceForge.
The following sites also host archives of the mailing lists:
Openbravo news
Openbravo's Forge has an artifact to publish news (Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS news). With this artifact all Openbravo's Forge projects are able to tell the world what is currently happening in their own project. In Openbravo ERP and POs we currently use it to:
- Communicate new versions of the product.
- Communicate the availability of extensions, localizations and modules.
- New resources available for people working with Openbravo (manuals, etc).
The Openbravo ERP and POS news channel is also a channel at Openbravo Planet.
Web based on-line forums
Forums allow people to discuss a variety of topics online using a web browser. Openbravo ERP support forums and Openbravo POS support forums provide a means to communicate with community members and project enthusiasts located all over the world. People discuss Openbravo features, configuration and installation issues or development questions among others.
Policy for creating new forums
Any user can ask Openbravo to create a new on-line forum. Our policy for creating on-line forums is:
- The forum should be only used to discuss issues related to Openbravo POS and ERP projects.
- A forum can be opened for a specific language or region.
- A forum can be split into other forums to reduce traffic and give more focus on a specific subject.
You can request new forums to collaborate@openbravo.com.
Recommendations
- Before answering a question check if it is explained in Openbravo community Wiki and instead of giving a full explanation give the user the URL that points to documentation that answers his or her question. This includes pointing users to our public roadmap when they ask about future development plans or release dates.
- Get to the point quickly. In your subject and in the first paragraph, clearly describe what problem you are having. Don't use "Help me!" as your subject.
- Don't create multiple topics for the same question. This makes it harder for people to find the solution as only one topic may be answered. Posting the same questions to multiple forums is called 'Cross Posting' and is also not going to help.
- Give all the details. After describing the problem, describe what version you're running and what module or page you are having a problem with. If relevant, describe what platform or database you're using, and paste detailed error log messages. If you have screen shots, post them on issue trackers or upload them to your site and provide a link.
- Before answering a question check if it is answered in our public FAQ. If it is, give the FAQ URL to the user pointing where the answer is instead of answering the question.
- After answering a question, if you think that it can be turned into a general question, consider taking some time and adding the question and its answer to our public FAQ.
- Quite often people describe behaviours of the application that are clearly bugs. Do not let that precious information to get lost in the forums; ask the user to file a bug with all the details that they can provide. If the user does not file a bug report, consider doing it yourself.
- If you detect a spam message or a highly offensive message contact Openbravo administrators (email address wiki at openbravo.com)
Openbravo IRC channels
Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is the precursor to instant messaging and chat rooms like those found on Yahoo! and innumerable other web sites. It is one of the best ways to get help fast but it is also a way to hang out and become part of the Openbravo community.
As many other open source projects, Openbravo has its own discussion channel that allows real time communication between the different community members where they can exchange quickly ideas, doubts and projects.
- English language channel
- Server: irc.freenode.net
- Channel name: #openbravo
- Spanish language channel
- Server: irc.freenode.net
- Channel name: #openbravo-es
Software
There are many open source clients. These are some of the most popular ones, available for Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and *BSD:
Joining #openbravo via browser
If you're unable to use the IRC clients listed above you can join #openbravo using the Webchat @ Freenode
- Nickname: enter a nickname
- Channel(s): #openbravo or #openbravo-es (spanish one)
Registering nicks
Freenode allows users to register their nicks in order to keep them between sessions and avoid vandalism.
To register your nick send a message with your password to the nick server.
/msg NickServ REGISTER Password
Once the nick is registered you should identify to the nick server every time that you connect using the following command:
/msg NickServ IDENTIFY Password
Note that due to recent Freenode's spam policies, only registered users can send private messages to other users. In case you want to get messages from unregistered users, type the following command:
/msg NickServ SET UNFILTERED ON
Netiquette
Although IRC is mostly unrestricted, there are certain rules/etiquette everyone must follow:
- English is the most widely understood language on IRC. If you wish to speak to friends in a different language, you may create a separate channel and put a language restriction in your topic.
- Search before you ask. In many cases, your questions have already been answered before. Places to search include the Forums, the Wiki and Google.
- Stay on topic. Even if you see other people being off topic, this does not mean that you should be.
- Always be friendly. Don't pick fights or arguments and antagonize other users.
- Be patient. If nobody is answering your question, it may be because nobody is around to read it, or nobody present knows the answer.
- Don't ask to ask, just ask. Ask your stuff, don't ask if we're "alive" nor "anyone using XYZ"!
- THIS IS SHOUTING ON IRC SO AVOID TYPING ALL CAPS.
- Never flood the channel sending large amounts of information. Use a free service such as pastebin and just post a link to it.
- Use a charset everyone can read: UTF-8.
Logs
There are two loggers, both classified by channel and by day:
- Official logs, #openbravo and #openbravo-es.
- Run by Ville Lindfors, #openbravo and #openbravo-es.
Statistics
- All time statistics, #openbravo and #openbravo-es.
- Last month's statistics, #openbravo and #openbravo-es.
Chat Meetings
Openbravo holds regular IRC meetings to coordinate community efforts.
24/7 IRC for developers
This is an offer for all developers. Openbravo has a dedicated machine to be used as IRC client. So that the machine stays connected to IRC 24/7 and you can connect to the machine whenever you want. Generally this is achieved using a text based IRC client (e.g. irssi), SSH and a program that allows you detaching and reattaching to a terminal session (e.g.screen, dtach).
This means you can stay connected to #openbravo and the #openbravo-xx channels forever, and connect whenever you want to check and answer the messages.
Request
Those who are interested should send an e-mail to staff.rm at openbravo dot com, specifying the desired user name for the SSH access and attaching a public SSH key. If you don't have one or don't know that it is, perform the following steps to generate one:
Open a terminal with your everyday user. And then generate the key, specifying a passphrase you only know.
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -b 1024 Generating public/private dsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ken/.ssh/id_dsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /home/ken/.ssh/id_dsa. Your public key has been saved in /home/ken/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. The key fingerprint is: 43:6f:1b:0f:dd:a1:43:15:50:45:b0:65:dd:83:51:18 ken@Atlantis
Now you have generated a private (/home/ken/.ssh/id_dsa) and public (/home/ken/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) keypair. id_dsa.pub is the file you should attach in the e-mail.
Usage
The first time you log into the system start screen or dtach session. In this example we'll use screen:
$ ssh irc.openbravo.com $ screen -AmdS irc $ screen -d -r irc $ irssi
When you want to leave IRC, just close that terminal session. And when you want to log in back to the server, attach yourself to the screen session:
$ ssh irc.openbravo.com $ screen -d -r irc
To make it even more automatic, you can make it automatically enter the IRC session right after SSHing:
$ echo "screen -d -r irc" >> ~/.bash_profile
Note of gratitude
Openbravo wants to thank the people behind irc.freenode.net for providing the infrastructure for supporting our channel.