Establishing communication with the project

I have had my IRC client, Pidgin, installed for several days now and I have been logged into the Banshee chat room since. Just lurking… I have been monitoring conversation and observing etiquette. Have not contributed to any conversations yet but I am positive my time will come.

There are several things that I have noticed while hanging in the shadows.  I have noticed that when you are talking directly to a person you should begin your comment with their nick. There is a bugbot that comments when people post new bugs or make updates to bugs. Also, all the conversations are mainly related directly to the project, there is no small talk. When going through the history I did find a few instances of short, off the subject chat, but not much. One other good thing that I noticed, the Banshee chat room for our project stays filled with a good amount of people. Hopefully this means help will be readily available when needed.

The other night I subscribed our group to the Banshee mailing list. This will be a good way to stay in the loop with the project.  After submitting my request it said I would be contacted shortly via email. I waited but have not received an email and this was a couple of days ago. Therefore I decided to go to the website and submit another request using a personal email address. We will see if anything happens from this one. While on the site I checked out the archived files. There are many conversations in the archive, some dating all the way back to 2005. The project was created around then so these may be some the initial emails of this project. I read some of the emails from 2005. I did not find anything too exciting. There were a lot of feature requests though and some requesting the features wanted to help develop them. That is pretty cool! Just like Raymond said, your users can become one of your greatest resources. Some of these emails are real life examples.

I have an update on the mailing list situation. I received my conformation email a bit ago from my second submission. I confirmed and have now begun to receive emails from the Banshee project.  Nice, looks like I am in. I am on the mailing list and have the IRC channel setup.

Soon to come, my take on “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.