can i? depending on phase of life maybe sometimes. can pascal, you, et al.? yes 
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Can we? Discussions become unwieldy, unstructured and unproductive, hardly ever finishing with concensus, leading to either silent or rage quitting and forcing Pascal to take all the unpopular decisions.
My personal idea of what open source software is, is that it is mainly it’s community. The software is nothing without it’s community, contributors and users alike.
So building a healthy, constructive, helpful, and welcoming community is the main goal. And one part of maintaining a sustainable community is new members. Why? Well people die, find other hobbies, leave for other priorities and so forth. So any long term healthy community needs an influx of new users to compensate for its natural loss of members. And remember that only a fraction of people trying the software become users and only a fraction of users report bugs and only a fraction of bug reports become developers and only a fraction of developers become long term committed developers…
(I’m essentially copy pasting this mind set from other community driven areas of my life. Mainly being an active Lindy Hop dancer/instructor and always pushing for the extreme importance of prioritizing beginners. A dance community quickly fades away into emptiness without new dancers).
Keywords: healthy, constructive, helpful, and welcoming.
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@jandren I concur. That is why we get along. 
Note: oops, I ended up writing more than I expected below.
On community, from my user and moderation experience:
Especially true today is the fact that people have little patience for nonsense and toxicity. People are also fickle. If a community isn’t welcoming, then so long, I never knew you, with angry people badmouthing in some corner of the internet. (Hopefully, just a corner, and not burning the rest of us in their nuclear meltdown.)
My director from work always reminds me to bring value to people. Value means doing things that make engagement and delivery as frictionless as possible and have immediate relevance to expectations. It doesn’t matter how amazing we or our work are, work and actions are waste if they don’t bring value.
An example of waste is how many discussions turn out in the forum. Too many words without much consideration, people talking past each other and uncivil behaviour. Although it is wonderful to wind down and let it out once in a while, wasteful dialogue doesn’t go anywhere and often makes things worse.
Another example of waste is the technical barrier. We are all nerds or geeks, but do note that this demographic is not homogeneous. People are enthusiasts and experts in very different things. A healthy community recognizes and accommodates the differences in background, expertise and values.
To me, overly technical discussions and documentation alienates a large proportion of the population. It would be worth considering creating a space where there can be a novice-friendly parallel to technical streams. The technical has value too, just not in certain moments and contexts. (So, please! Don’t enter the discussion with technobabble if it isn’t required or relevant.)
(And don’t get me started on people providing misinformation intentionally or unintentionally. As a forum member, please flag such content for removal or revision!)
In general, hard to parse discussions tend to be (a) harder to enter, (b) harder to return to and (c) harder to search and discover for humans and algorithms.
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And one (definitely not the only, and maybe not even most important) aspect of that is trying to avoid the wrong kind of crowd coming in and ruining the party for everyone.
So if new people showed up and immediately started pushing around and making a mess, demanding the music be changed because nobody likes that old stuff anymore and never staying around to clean up afterwards, how welcoming would you be after first gently trying to explain the “rules”. You stay open minded, but often you get a feel from the beginning whether you’re dealing with the kind that actually wants to stay around for the long term. And even the nice ones, if they don’t make any progress, only showing up now and then, but then always expecting the first two hours to be dedicated to slow music so they can tag along, maybe you’ll gradually find that without the right mix, the old crowd starts showing up less and less often…
I know this is a silly comparison and things like that anyway probably don’t happen in the real world. But unfortunately here they do. It is a balance, and just because people are “inside” doesn’t mean they have higher value than new joiners or can’t be more destructive.
It is certainly a difficult balance and not one to take lightly. Often, there isn’t a good outcome to situations that arise and so you end up choosing the least bad option.
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yes indeed, the “community” is everything. But debate must be encouraged and opposite views must be presented and listened to. It requires patience and humility, but it create “values” eventually . This is how things can advance (dixit Carl Sagan). For most, I always found that we have this type of exchanges in the DT forum (e.g. the long discussions about the new filter stuff) and I surely appreciate that a lot. Respectful discussions unleash our creativity. “Toxicity” is difficult to define, maybe we can relate that to behavior of people that insult those who disagree with them (attacking the messenger instead of the message). In my opinion, this must not be tolerated after some buffer time.
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I think most of that is dealt with by the courses that are arranged. No one is expected to know the dance before hand so courses are organized and then beginner course usually takes the time to introduce the culture as well not only the dance.
I guess the equivalent in darktable would be play raws and easy to follow tutorials such as the Editing Moments series.
As for new users comming with ridiculous feature requests. I think the only thing a the community has to do with these is to say “thank you for your input we will take it into consideration going forward”. So I think Blender has a very good solution to that with its right click select page. Right-Click Select — Blender Community
It encourages users to share their ideas but it also offers no contract that it will be done, just seen. That’s all, and I think it’s enough. And much much better than calling someone stupid because they don’t understand darktable!
As for attracting “the right” crowd, live as you want your crowd to be and it shall come.
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Hello,
Thank you for reopening the debate in a very positive and constructive way.
I think that the strength of a free and opensource software such as Darktable, is the absence of an economic model, which makes it a research and development project without any financial constraint except its operating costs.
As in all communities, societies, the feeling of belonging is primordial, it is human (Maslow’s pyramid).
As a user, I am happy to share my experience and grateful to be able to use Darktable thanks to all the information received.
I wish Darktable and its community a long creative life,
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
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I hope you understand what a massive compliment it is to the project to be held to the standard of such as Blender. From their 2021 annual report:
From dt github insights for January:
and a bunch of those are one-line spelling corrections.
There’s no reason why those 5 guys and a horse’s head who contribute code should also be the ones to provide courses on civil behavior or as a collective be held responsible for the aggressive responses of some of them. Anybody here can also jump on github and try to improve the discourse there. Or triage bug reports so that they become more useful rather than off-putting to the ones who stand a chance of fixing them (both by quality and quantity). Or provide testing feedback on PRs before they get merged into master (which is the point people feel entitled to complain that their production system got broken).
I really don’t believe the problem is that issues or PRs are not correctly marked as RFCs. It is just a lot more work to think things through to the end and stand by your opinions and conclusions, which coding requires, rather than just added 2c here and there and then moving on to more entertaining things on twitter.
IMHO everybody who proposes better ways of doing things should first consider what they themselves are going to do.
Because the people that do try to respond to good suggestions will never do a good enough job to satisfy everybody in their spare time. And as you can tell from the graph there are a few of them that if they decide there are other things they could do in the next month or year that give them more joy (or financial rewards) the project is basically over.
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I think clearly marking things is a good step forward. But you are right, this is just one thing of several that makes the process of adding features and gathering feedback very opaque.
I often wonder what the “I can’t code but I want to help” crowd thinks their going to end up doing. I’ve seen many offers to help that never materialize seemingly because “I don’t want to do that!”
This was explained here very clearly. RFC - Request For Comments
You can count the number of responses to a recent open RFC. Go on, it won’t take you very long.
It came up two days ago. You have to give it some time and also people need to learn that its worth their time to contribute.
Thank you for this information, I did not know about this procedure and I will gladly participate.
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
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The PR I was referring to has just been merged (without the change Comments were Requested For). A new PR addressing just that change will be submitted today or tomorrow and your input will then be greatly appreciated.
For our readers’ convenience, please post links to the PRs. Thanks!
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Anyone can watch the issue tracker and do this. They can start threads here to gather feedback or just point to something they think is interesting.
Users who wish to provide feedback need to put in a little effort to find things, learn about the project flow, etc etc. We have been down this path before and users expect things curated and served to them on a silver platter, yet nobody wanted to do the curation and serving. The developers are unlikely to do this administrative task.
Hello,
You are partly right, no respectful user will say the opposite. On the other hand, you have to admit that not everyone is familiar with the environment and the language used by the developers (github). Personally, I made all my career in the food industry (R&D + commercial and marketing strategy in the bakery and pastry sector) so I have to learn the rules to be able to communicate efficiently and use the functionalities offered by Github.
For this point, I don’t agree with you, …
Greetings from Brussels,
Christian
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You’re free to say “I don’t want to learn something new” but everyone was unfamiliar with github at some point, so the point is moot. As for language, most don’t speak English as a first language and I feel there is a lot of tolerance if you’re trying in good faith.
That’s fine, but this wasn’t an opinion, it’s a recap of something that has ready happened, and is sliding that way again, starting (probably inadvertently) with @afre’s comments.
There is no PM or person to interface between developers and users. That is all thankless admin work and understandable why nobody does it.