This is a suggestion for getting people more involved with the KDE community.
Setup an AskUbuntu type Q&A site. This could be with the StackExchange network like Ubuntu did or KDE host their own with ask.kde.org
There is an open source Q&A system that I have been playing around with and it is quite good called "Question2Answer" - http://question2answer.org/
Thoughts?
There doesn't appear to be any Krita site like that. It looks like it was discussed a couple of years ago on the Forum but doesn't appear it was ever made. - https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=288&t=125575
I think this was referring to a Q&A site for Krita though and I'm suggesting one for all of KDE. There isn't an organized way of getting help from the KDE Community right now and while a Forum is nice to have it has many limitations.
Even if it has a slightly different use case than the forum, they share the same issue: the number of people able to answer. This is not to say that it can't be done, but the I think that adding more services with the same amount of people looking at them (mailing lists, forums and IM(IRC/Matrix.Telegram)) may not scale properly.
While I would normally agree with that point because of spreading too thin. Q&A sites allows for so many greater benefits:
I think a Forum is great for discussions but Q&A is much better for support and information searches.
I would say for most anyone under the age of 50 coming over to Linux, a website like this would be invaluable. Which is a nice way to say they probably have never used IRC in their life, and also probably don't navigate forums all that much, and don't know about mailing lists (or hate the concept of them even if they are aware). Further, IRC is not easily searchable and most users would not know where or how to find and search archives.
What users do use are web searches and this is where, over time, a website like this would shine (I'm in 100% agreement with the bullet point above about SEO, as well as the other benefits). I also like the concept that sites like Ask Ubuntu and SE use whereby answers can be up-voted based on the quality of the content. I run Neon, and the Ask Ubuntu site has saved me many times, simply by being the most quality answers that my web search ranks in it's results. I also think that developers would be genuinely curious as to what issues / questions users have the most regarding their own projects, and this could be a good platform to help quantify that?. - Perhaps more so than, say, bugs.kde.org, or the forums, with the latter not seen often by devs in my experience.
We could gain a lot from something like this, at minimal cost and resources, since it's 100% community-driven, and self-policing to a large part. Let's face it, Plasma is an awesome, large, highly-customizeable beast, and a growing repository of information in one place for things like KWin config guides and the like would be simply a great resource. And having them on a platform more accessible than IRC, mailing lists, or forums can only be a good thing.
Please note that I'm not questioning the usefulness of a Q&A site. I'm wondering if it can end up like the forum (initially guarded, now only few projects receives answers). I was mentioning mailing lists, IM and forums to highlight that, for example, developers and many community members are already active there, if they are active, and another services may not receive enough attention.
The cost is never minimal: everything here is community driven, including forums and mailing lists (our sysadmins are volunteers too).
We could always ditch Userbase and re-purpose those resources into something like this ;) - I'm only half-joking here. But there's no way anyone can convince me that something like this wouldn't be more invaluable than, say, the Users mailing list, which clearly isn't get a lot of action these days, with posts like this wanting to help but no answers as to how to do it. I have to believe that if this same question were asked on ask.kde.org, the answer would be relatively immediate...since it can be answered by anyone on the internet who wants and is not hampered by the limitations of needing to be subscribed to a mailing list to get help. In fact, were the same question asked on the ask.kde site, not only would the answers be more immediate, but future devs looking to contribute would be directed here! Even if the question on the ML I gave an example of here were answered in a meaningful way, it's more or less a 1-time thing lost on the 'net and for the general public...
I guess what I'm trying to say is we need to acknowledge that there is a finite amount of resources available to us; let's make sure we're getting the most bang for the buck.
Phabricator has an application called "Ponder" (not available on our instance yet) which essentially supports Q&A style workflows. This would nicely integrate with the existing notifications and project tags, and every forum user already has an Identity account anyway.
But surely now the forum trolls will infest our beloved Phab? Maybe, but that can be dealt with and it's a price I'd gladly pay to get potential new contributors closer to jumping in, which this would make so much easier.
(Just a quick idea I wanted to mention, obviously this would need further evaluation or a small field test. Might also be worth asking for experiences made in other Phab Ponder installations regarding the maturity of the module.)
Yeah, seems redundant. Let's focus on that. If we find that it doesn't work out, we can always revisit this.