Monday, May 19, 2008

Loaded OpenMoko: An Open Source Smartphone Platform

Last week we received on our feedback form a request to load the OpenMoko mailing lists. These folks are creating an open source smartphone platform, very cool stuff. Along with the request, the requester explained the benefit he saw in having MarkMail archive the OpenMoko lists, from the perspective of a project participant. I've reprinted it here with permission:

I would LOVE to see the OpenMoko lists get into MarkMail.. for 2 reasons..

1. From a developer perspective, I'm new to the OpenMoko platform and still learning the build system, etc. and am eager to start writing my own applications. But there's only so much info on the wiki and like many young communities all the juicy info is buried in the Mailing lists. So I'd love to be able to search all the lists for things like installing the sim card, what new hardware bugs they've found on the dev list, how to modify the dialer application, etc. This is where MarkMail really shines and is the best platform out there for this type of information gathering from community lists. If these lists were in MarkMail it would be one of the ONLY places one could find some of this information because of the advanced search functions in MarkMail. I think this holds true for a lot of young open source communities and MarkMail can really help out.

2. I think it would help the community in general by giving users an avenue to find the information they need to start better participating and contributing back. There would be less duplication of questions which distracts everyone on the list and hopefully more "I see how things are being done because I got all caught up by searching MarkMail, how about we do it this way.." etc.
Of course we loaded the lists for him. Here's the activity chart:

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