It’s tougher than you might think to write public news updates and press releases that will get community scrutiny (especially if your community is pedantic like geeks tend to be–I should know: I am one!). These kinds of releases require a lot of back and forth between technical and non-technical teams, a lot of eyes reviewing text looking for mistakes, and even then sometimes mistakes or omissions happen because the author may not have all of the information (or up-to-date information).
I’ll draft up a few hypothetical forum post titles that might result from the above hypothetical press release to illustrate the point. In this case the press release made a mistake on the final battery capacity (3500mAh) and made an additional claim that the modem fix may extend into Chestnut instead of “a few days” as reported previously. Also in a lapse in transparency, it references “supply issues” without elaborating on what it means or which areas it might impact:
- “Purism lies about battery capacity, Evergreen now changed from 3500mAh to 3000mAh.”
- “Power consumption analysis: will 3000mAh last all day?”
- “2000mAh for Dogwood? Why I’m switching to Evergreen”
- “Official: Modem fix now dragging on through Chestnut? No calls until 2020?”
- “The official “supply issues” thread?”
As I mentioned in a different thread a few weeks back:
In the past we had decided to lean more on the side of only publishing updates when we knew things for sure. After Aspen the community made it clear that they’d rather us publish more frequent updates even if there was a risk the information would change, so we are trying to lean more on the other side.
So we are trying to err on the side of more frequent updates even if it means including information that might change. In the case of the battery capacity question, those of us (myself included) who were working on the fact checking for the Birch shipping post and documenting the known issues did not know that the battery was anything but 3500mAh–I’d like to think that I’m pretty well informed on what’s going on, yet I personally found out only a few days ago when I heard rumblings in the community and before that point I had no reason to think to ask. That said, we do plan to mention it in the next update post we have planned about modem call routing and other Librem 5 updates (if you follow our code repositories you can see all the progress we’ve been making on the modem sound routing issue).