Setting up a communication strategy

[philpax]

There's a lot of confusion about what's in flight / planned at any point. Developers have to keep up with the Discord channels to know what's going on at any given point. For example, I don't know what's going on with .NET6 right now, because I haven't been paying that much attention to it.

We should figure out a systematic way of getting information out to developers, preferably with a regular cadence, so that they know what to expect. I'm not too familiar with how this is done for an always-moving FOSS ecosystem. Going to tag some people who I think might have some ideas:

• @ackwell
• @Aida-Enna
• @karashiiro
• @ayyaruq

Some rough ideas:

• a newsletter
• a Discord channel dedicated to dev announcements
• a section of Rebuild goatcorp.github.io and feed more things into it #48 with the latest in dev news

[karashiiro]

I'm going to defer to someone else for comments on what other FOSS projects do since I don't have experience with other distributed open-source projects, but I don't think an episodic resource like a newsletter or an announcement is a good idea for this, since it puts the responsibility for maintaining the resource on a single person. It'd be better if we set up a process for encouraging people to publicly track their own tasks in a more organized (and searchable) way, like using issues with checklists and a more comprehensive set of labels or something along those lines.

[Kouzukii]

What about a single wiki page or markdown file that contains versioned/timestamped upgrade instructions for developers as well as upcoming changes.
So even if someone hasn't checked in for half a year they can catch up easily.

[karashiiro]

A centralized resource could also be a part of this, but if we have something like that it should be a thin layer on top of a solid process, and not a replacement for one that just hides the complexity of actually tracking work.

[goaaats]

What's wrong with what I've been doing here? https://github.com/goatcorp/Dalamud/discussions/categories/announcements

[NotNite]

I don't think it's bad - we just need to raise awareness of it more. Plugin developers are not actively watching it. Also, it's not being used as much. Are there RSS feeds we could make for it, potentially?

also i'd be fine with writing goatcorp blogposts that just happen to include developer announcements

[Kouzukii]

Well I like the announcements a lot, but it's missing everything to do with DP17 for example.

[goaaats]

The API7 post has a section on it, I guess it could have been a separate one, but I don't think I would have written more than that

[karashiiro]

The GitHub announcements that are pinged for on Discord are mostly used for informing plugin devs of changes, not really for keeping Dalamud devs (or potential ones) updated.

[philpax]

What's wrong with what I've been doing here? https://github.com/goatcorp/Dalamud/discussions/categories/announcements

I had no idea that existed. Seems fine, but we need to communicate it more and use it more often; I've had people raise concerns with me about being surprised by API breaks and ecosystem changes that were introduced without notice. Of course, those things didn't happen by malice, but they still happen.

[philpax]

The API7 post has a section on it, I guess it could have been a separate one, but I don't think I would have written more than that

I think "the way you package and submit plugins has completely changed" is worthy of its own announcement imo

[karashiiro]

Discussion announcements are paired with a ping to the plugin developers role on Discord, so the people who are most affected by these changes should be seeing them (unless they have role pings disabled but that's on them).

[ayyaruq]

Sorry for the extremely delayed reply, just saw this notification and I'm extremely out of touch with what's going on in Dalamud. If you're looking for a comparison to other major projects, the main way boils down to sig channels.

Slack rather than Discord, but Kubernetes, the CNCF, half a dozen linux distros, and most similar "big" projects have channels called #sig-whatever, for example sig-security or sig-networking. These allow developers to follow discussion in a single place in a way that's categorised by the topic or subsystem that's relevant to them. When decisions are made and things need to circulate, each sig has a mailing list (usually Google Discussions or whatever it's called, otherwise actual mail). You could likely do the same for the major bits of Dalamud (packets/opcodes, client structs, core API, sheet data or whatever, etc) and use a Discord broadcast channel to share decisions (maybe useful for plugins with their own servers?).

Alternatively, GitHub Discussions is very good and centralised, easily categorised, and less reliance on following a live chat when time zones might force you to miss things. End of the day nothing will be a good solution unless people use it, so whatever is chosen should be frequently linked and mentioned to get people on board. I'm not gonna recommend any particular way as I've no context on what works for this community, but those seem like the most logical options based on other projects I'm involved with.