[rudie_rage]

Before I even start, I'm just going to say this post is gonna be long, and be pretty meaningless except to stir up opinions and thoughts.

That said, I've made a few observations since I joined 'the linux community' about a year or two ago. The largest one being that there is no central community. There are small (and large) groups of people that form communities such as these forums or the linuxquestion forums, and there are beacons of interest all over the web such as linux.org and kernel.org, but no core of organization and unity.

Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Open source communities, by nature, were destined to evolve in such a way. Everybody puts their own two cents in, and nobody really controls anything in a strict sense of the word.

What would you think the pros/cons would be to having such centralization. Just to throw in a hypothetical situation, imagine all the linux help forums, all the linux IRC channels, and links to every kind of related info and distro placed on one website controlled by the community (yeah, havent thought about the details of that last part yet) and by some divine power 75% or more of the linux user base decided to use said site as their key resource.

It would be impressive to say the least, and it would definitely show just how large we are despite ideas conceived by the linux-ignorant. The presence alone may be enough to convince hardware manufacturers to finally make some decent drivers for us.

On the other side of the coin, that would be a lot of people on one site. The bandwidth would be phenomenal, and keeping up to the site would be a full time job for quite a few people. The small home-like feeling small forums like this have would be gone without a doubt. Arguments and flaming may become out of hand when you put that many people together, especially people that all have different preferences, distros, and ideas.

Personally, I think a site like that would be very cool. A place to call home. That is just my opinion, and in reality it might not even be possible to make it work out like my hypothetical situation.

So, thoughts, anyone? What would it take to make it happen? would it work? what benefits would it have? what problems could it cause?

[ozar]

I like having lots of choices, and would not want all users to be on one site, or to have only one distro, etc, etc, etc.

[rudie_rage]

I have to agree with the one distro thing. There are too many purposes for a computer to organize into one distro.

I wasnt suggesting less flavours of linux, more of just a hub of organization for all of said flavours

[ozar]

If all Linux users grouped together on just one website, and for some reason I decided that I didn't like that site, where would I go for help?

Should I give up Linux?

Do I have to surf a website that I really don't want to be a part of?

Do I start another website so that we no longer have just one website for Linux?

[rudie_rage]

Originally Posted by ozar

If all Linux users grouped together on just one website, and for some reason I decided that I didn't like that site, where would I go for help?

Should I give up Linux?

Do I have to surf a website that I really don't want to be a part of?

Do I start another website so that we no longer have just one website for Linux?

That is probably one of the major reasons linux communities are scattered. Different people have different ideas on what makes a good community.

[DrMega]

I personally think its a damned good idea. Why don't you set about it? You'd have at least one persons support (mine).

Pros:
1. A single web address for everything Linux related, including bug reports, help, forums etc.
2. More "visibility" of other projects, this in turn brings the next few benefits...
3. Less duplication of effort (unless the project teams want to keep their efforts seperate, which is of course fine), because there would be more awareness of similar projects and design ideas.
4. Dare I say it, better software, because project teams could either colaborate (see point 3) or compete.
5. Better and easier communication, instead of having to join and log into and keep an eye on several different forums.
6. A more coordinated approach might make hardware vendors and commercial software developers take Linux seriously, and thus promoting better support.
7. A consolidated community makes us easier to count. Now that there is a really significant number of us, if we pubicise that number then again Linux might be taken more seriously by those who are "Linux ignorant" as you say.

Cons:
1. One website, on one server = single point of failure. However this risk can be minimised by choosing a reliable and credible web host with good infrastructure, and by mirroring the less dynamic aspects of the site.

OTHER THOUGHTS:

I don't think such a site needs specifically to compete with forums such as this one, the could all compliment each other. It would be great if the various site owners would agree to open information sharing. For example I've seen various hardware compatibility databases, each with a subset of the bigger picture. If they all shared their info, then you'd have a really great tool.

You'd have to be careful for the first few days/weeks after launch to make it quite clear that the site has just launched. It would be quite unfortunate if people were lured in on a promise of an all single all dancing massive resource, and found two half finished static pages and a forum of only two members. They'd just laugh and never come back, and it would damage the credibilty of Linux. If it is made clear it is new, and still under contruction, then most sensible people would forgive the early lack of content/resources/members etc.

One of your concerns was that if you put huge numbers of people into the same pot, then you'd have huge fights on your hands. I don't think this would happen. The trick would be to try and group topics and resources, just as most forums and resource sites do. There would be the occassional exchange, but the ability to sound out ideas, even if slightly controversial, and then hopefully get a resolution is whats great about these forums.

In terms of needing huge numbers of moderators and administrators, I don't think this is the case. In an open forum environment, the members would more or less administer everything themselves, by their own contribution. You'd need some superusers, to delete really offensive stuff, or edit stuff that is just plain wrong etc, and to hound the web hosts when the site has an outage, but I don't think you'd need loads of people, and you could ask for volunteers from the community to help with most of that. Have some kind of election system so that you don't even have to worry too much about screening people, the larger community will screen them for you via their voting system.

If you're serious about this, give me a shout, I'd be happy to give you a hand.

[rudie_rage]

Originally Posted by DrMega

If you're serious about this, give me a shout, I'd be happy to give you a hand.

As much as I agree with most of your points stated above, I'm far from qualified to take on such a big project

If someone was seriously considering doing this, I'd put in my share of the work, but I'm definitely not 'in the loop' enough to organize something so drastic. lol.

Again, as far as I'm concerned, I'm talking hypothetically. I dont expect this idea to take off. On the other hand, if someone thinks otherwise, and is willing to lead such a project, I'd be more than willing to do what I can.

But that brings up another question: Who _would_ be qualified to lead this project?

I mean, every community needs one figurehead. You cant just go giving root access to every volunteer that decides they want to help. Someone has to keep track of the vision, and thats much easier with one person in the lead.

Also, could you imagine what would happen once this site launched? As DrMega said, it would be pretty deserted for a short while, but even putting that aside, having such an organization pop up out of nowhere and say they are the center of linux without a question... Sounds almost like a violent takeover to me. Who gives them the right to be called the 'official' anything?

Would something such as this have to emerge from an already growing community? That way it wouldnt be such a shock? You would start with a larger forum such as this. Start adding links and articles at a rapid pace, start making archives of tutorials and wiki's for every possible known problem for every possible distribution for every possible hardware configuration... It grows out of hand quickly, but if you did it bit by bit and just grew into a supercommunity, it might be possible. I'm sure there are already sites striving to do just that. I mean, even this one has articles and news and whatnot. It just hasnt grown big enough, it hasnt gotten the majority vote to be considered official. Nothing has.

Edit:

something that might be feasible would be like an open source related digg site. It would quickly collect news articles and blog entries on all sorts of topics. Users would have more than enough reading material to keep entertained and up to date. Everything from new kernel releases to how to have a partition automount on startup... Its a thought. then again, slashdot isnt far from that idea.

[tommytabib]

I actually don't like the idea that much, i mean it would be great for somethings but i prefer the closeness of a small community of really dedicated people who really want to help - like this very forum. If you had everyone on a large forum, without sounding mean, there would be a lot of.....well......idiots who just want to cause trouble and piss people off and give stupid answers.

But that's just my opinion, and i even find the ubuntu forums too busy for me to handle.

[apoorv_khurasia]

Do you find a single news channel, a single airline company or a single ISP for all or a single windows help center?? No...market competition makes things better and evolved.

A better idea is already in practice....one standard forum for each distro maintained by(at) the distro people (say Gentoo Forums :: Index, or bsdforums.org - FreeBSD OpenBSD NetBSD Darwin Mac OSX Linux Unix forums, message boards, discussions and news. or windows xp newsgroup). For common forums (such as Open Source and Linux Forums and linuxquestions.org)the market forces will decide which one will prevail...or get more users.

[fingal]

I think the fact that we're not centralised is a good thing. Why? Well, if one resource 'falls over' there are plenty more to choose from.

The idea of 'a Linux community' is quite abstract, and Forums like this are just one aspect of this. If LF.O disappeared tomorrow there would still be people sharing code, and they can probably just get by using e-mail.

The Internet is distributive by its nature, and in a sense everything you need is already in one place ... Not a single physical location or resource, but accessible from a web browser.

Just my 10 pence worth of vapour.

To quote my old mum, 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket.'