A major thanks to everyone involved in the gitlab migration. It’s no doubted a huge leap forward for GNOME on so many fronts.

Before we lose that momentum, I’d like to bring up in the collective minds of our project, what I consider, a separate problem. That is Bug Tracking versus User Support.

We’ve gotten a lot of flack over the years for brash or abrupt comments in our bug trackers. And while I can see that from a certain angle, I think in many cases it’s due to the miss-use of bug trackers as a user support mechanism.

For example, I’ve always seen a bug tracker as an engineering journal: a way to keep track of symptoms, potential solutions and trade-offs, and finally, the chosen solution. One valuable aspect to this is that you don’t have to go mucking through unrelated information or prose to pick out the valuable bits. In other words, terseness.

Where as user support has a different focus. The focus is on the user and their symptom, making them feel heard, and do our best to convert that information into a succinct chain of information for the engineering journal.

Treating engineering journals and user support as equivalent is preventing us from doing either with proficiency.

We generally don’t have this focus in F/OSS. It requires a set of skills that many of us have not cultivated and probably should. In addition, we should encourage those that already have these skills to join us.

But that raises the question: is gitlab the right place to do user support?

If GNOME were to advance Free Software by taking user support to the next level, what would that look like and what tooling do we need? Is that worth investing in now that we have many applications to support in addition to the desktop plumbing?

Hopefully we can have some discussion about that on the beach in Almería, Spain for GUADEC 2018.