Ah, the heck with it. I don’t write a lot about a whole lot here any more, because most of what I am excited to share revolves around Habari. But then, all of the people who talk about what to write about on a blog tell you to write about things that you have passion about. And I’ve never not done that, but I’m purposefully filtering out a lot of Habari stuff because I feel like my audience doesn’t care. Which is just a weird thought. Anyway, no more of that madness.
Something that has been tryingly amusing lately are a certain type of email that shows up on the mailing lists. As I’ve mentioned to people in person a few times, Habari certainly isn’t talked about as much as some other blog software, but I’ve been tracking the usual channels for Habari buzz, and there are usually 50 to 70 new people noticing Habari every day. Which I think is pretty good, and would love to see increase.
As a result of that ramp-up of attention, we’re seeing an influx of new users. A lot of Habari’s users are polyglots and English isn’t their first language. So when folks start messages with, “Habari is bad,” I am forced to wonder whether they’re using their limited English skills as best they can, or whether they’re coming from some other software and just looking to pick a fight. Either way, let’s talk about a better approach.
Habari has a better approach, one that applies to pretty much any open source software. In fact, it’s probably why the software you’re familiar with has the feature you’re looking for in the first place: You take it to the community, they listen, and together you find a solution.
What’s interesting about this in respect to Habari is that when you bring something to the community, you become part of the community. Sure, there are people who just want to drop off their complaints and move back into the comfort zone of familiarity with their old software. But with Habari we take at least an interest in people willing to foster an idea through completion. Propose some solutions. Interact with others to come up with something that is most useful for the whole community.
It’s also weird to talk about Habari in terms of other software. I mean, I realize that sometimes it’s more convenient to talk about a feature by saying it’s like some feature in other software. But you have to be careful with this. In many cases, the reasons Habari does things differently is specifically to not be like that other software.
We like to think things through. Was what we saw in that other software the best approach to the issue? Is that implemented in The Habari Way? If not, then it deserves reconsideration.
Just as an example, I was talking online tonight about tags. Why the heck do we call them “tags”? Why not “keywords”? Now, I’m not suggesting that we should re-label all of the fields in the interface from “tags” to “keywords”, but I think that it’s interesting that some word like “tags”, which has a completely different meaning to people who are not into the blogging world, suits better than “keywords” which is really what those tags are.
Sure you could argue the point that tags are more category-like, and keywords would be culled from raw content. That’s really not the point in what I’m trying to convey here. What I’m saying is, isn’t it strange that we gloss over this term when we see it now? I think everything deserves to be questioned. Everything can be looked at in a new way. And for those cases where we’ve gone the other direction, don’t assume that we did or did not think about something when we were designing a feature. Sure, ask about it, but don’t simply assume that because it doesn’t look like everything else that it’s inferior or that a significant change or improvement isn’t on the schedule.
The idea is to be better. Your idea may meet some resistance, as many great ideas do at first. You might not even convince anyone to include your idea. But I think we’ve been pretty good about providing explanations in those cases for why we’ve decided to do something else, and we’re often very encouraging about making other people’s ideas come across clearly.
At the end of the mailing list messages, we’ll typically see a question asking for a solution. I’d say 95% of questions like this have some solution. And perhaps what Habari needs is a better way to connect potential users to the answers to those questions. I’d not say that they’re “frequently asked”. No, they’re mostly uncommon. But there should still be someplace and some way to connect users to the answers before they need to hit the mailing list.
Perhaps we’ll put some thought into solving this problem next.
