Redux: Gentoo’s top 3 issues

People were so busy complaining about my pie chart that most of them apparently didn’t have a chance to think about the meaning of the actual data. To try helping people look at the information rather than its presentation, here’s a bar chart of the same information:

I don’t recommend looking at it because you may go blind, but I’ve made available the (extremely ugly) script that created this.

What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers’ list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I’m going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

First question: What are the top 3 issues facing Gentoo?

Technical issues are way down on the list. Developers’ top 5 issues are manpower, publicity, goals, developer friction, and leadership. It’s good to see that we’ve been addressing at least a couple of them with the newly energized public relations project and work on the Code of Conduct. Other issues that have been ongoing for quite a while now are the lack of distro-wide vision and goals. The Council could provide those by increased activity and taking stronger stands in particular directions, and that’s part of the reason I did this survey—to figure out which directions our developers care about. I think part of the problem is that nobody sits around pondering directions and ideas. Everybody’s busy working in their own little areas and not thinking about the big picture. Manpower, or lack of it, is another issue I’m indirectly addressing in my push for greatness, which I’m going to post more about at some point (I promise!).

To create this chart, I used Google’s excellent chart API. The neat part about the API is that it’s simply a URL, so you can construct it with any language. I used a shell script since I was already fiddling around with awk. Any answer with less than 4 respondants was grouped into Other to make the rest of the chart readable.

LCA attendees rank Gentoo #4 distro

Everybody who went to LCA entered their distro, editor, and shell upon registration. Peter Lieverdink posted graphs of the results.

Gentoo made an excellent showing, coming in 4th after Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This is particularly neat because LCA attendees fit Gentoo’s target audience really well: developers and power users.

Thanks to Daniel Black for the link to that graph.

Improving Gentoo’s PR

This won’t be a long post, because I’m tired. Sorry for the dearth of posts on here, but I’ve been busy writing other things—see below.

For anyone who hasn’t heard, I took over as lead of Gentoo’s public relations efforts a little over two weeks ago. Three days earlier, I wrote an LWN article concluding that Gentoo isn’t falling apart, but it’s totally failing to communicate. After writing that article, I realized that somebody had to step up to deal with this problem—who better than me?

My focus right now is showing people that Gentoo development is just as alive as it’s ever been. I’m doing this by opening windows into development through more frequent news postings, with links to discussion forums to respond to the posts. Doing this, combined with writing to people (“You will”) rather than about them (saying “Users will…”), will help build better relationships with our users.

Another part of improving the perception of a lively, active community is updating the look of our website. The old website redesign never made it to fruition, so a few of us have begun taking a look at how far it got, what happened, and what to do now. At a minimum, I’d like to make some slight changes to give our site a face lift. The design hasn’t changed for 6 years now, and it shows.

One major, easily fixable problem with our website is that there’s no obvious place to go for users who want to contribute. There should be a big “Get involved!” or “Help Gentoo!” link right up at the top of the page, next to “Get Gentoo!” All this requires is a little webpage that describes all the ways people can help. In fact, the whole website isn’t task-oriented enough. This needs to change.

In the future, I’m going to begin improving the “press” aspect of PR, based on my notes from an excellent talk by Josh Berkus at OSCON 2006 on public relations for OSS projects. The main ideas here are providing a press kit for reporters with all the basic info they want, building relationships with local reporters by using local Gentoo contacts, putting together some case studies of people and businesses using Gentoo in interesting ways, and improving our process for creating and posting news and press releases.

Finally, any Gentoo users can help improve Gentoo by simply advocating it to Linux users you know, giving demos and talks at Linux user group meetings or conferences, promoting it in articles, or writing in your blog about something Gentoo does really well.