ApacheCon Europe 2016 Summary

[Rohan Verma <he...@rohanverma.net>]

Hello

I recently attended ApacheCon Europe 2016 and wanted to share some insights
and experiences.

- What do people know and how much people know about Apache Allura

From what I observed, people from North America seem to know about Allura
but don't know that it has more features than Git/Hg. Apart from North
Americans, people only seem to recall what Allura does when SourceForge is
mentioned.

I heard of Apache Allura being mentioned twice in the sessions of the
Conference at a Keynote and at a talk by Jim Jagielski and feel there is a
lot of interest in the community after they hear about the project but
since the project is not that exposed to the community, people are hesitant
to use it. But after explaining and talking about it, people get very
interested as it solves a lot of their problems. Although, inevitably
Github, and the Atlassian Suite come up in the conversation.

- Response after Presentation at the Apache BarCamp

I had the chance to present at the BarCamp and was able to demonstrate
(nearly) all the features of Allura. There was a diverse crowd and many
people from the COMDEV and UI/UX field as well. What most people liked was
how integrated all the features felt but found it difficult to use on the
first go.

The person from COMDEV, was interested to see the Wiki and Blog since it's
an important part of Community development and since at Apache, Community
comes first before Code. She felt that having a single point of entry for
Apache projects at an open source platform would greatly enhance community
development.

A person from the Apache Solr team wanted to see more Solr being used,
especially the new features and believes it would add value to the project.

A topic that was being discussed at the BarCamp before I began was how
Github, Slack, and IRC are a bit off-track from the Apache way in the
context of the "If it didn't happen on the mailing list, it did not happen"
and therefore, Apache Allura stands out due to the ability of being able to
email everything to the list.

A new idea that popped into my mind to solve the issue with IRC and the
Mailing List was to develop an API endpoint for the IRC logger plugin to be
able to send an email from a certain point. So, a meeting bot for IRC can
be created that logs a meeting on IRC and in the end calls the API endpoint
to email to the list at the end of the meeting. Also, if we could add the
text of the IRC logger into the Solr Search it would be great.

Another part of the project that stood out to a person involved with
Incubators was the Activity feed. He said that if that could be worked upon
to be made a bit better, it will lead to reducing the pain of the people on
the board to see the progress of podlings. He also wanted to see Merge
Requests to be on the mailing list.

--

Another thing I would like to mention is that this would be the time to get
involved with trying to setup a forge for the whole ASF projects since
right now a lot work is being done to upgrade. For eg. recently the mailing
list viewer was updated. See lists.apache.org

So I wish to end with some things that I propose that we could start with
from the middle of December, if convenient for everyone. (I really haven't
been able to devote any appreciable amount of time to the development of
the project during this semester, and therefore I'm now planning on working
only after my semester ends)

- Complete and push the JIRA importer
- Collaborate on a Roadmap for the project
- Clean the issues pending in the tracker
- Make a twitter handle and increase outreach
- Collaborate on COMDEV and post an email there to invite people to try
Allura
- Maybe mirror to forge.allura.org
- Collaborate and talk to the Infra team

Also, please share your ideas and suggestions.

-- 

Also, if anyone wants to read more about my experience, I have posted about
it on my blog at http://rohanverma.net/blog/tag/aceu16

-- 
Sincerely
Rohan Verma
hello@rohanverma.net

Re: ApacheCon Europe 2016 Summary

[Dave Brondsema <da...@brondsema.net>]

Thanks for sharing this.  A few comments inline:

On 11/23/16 7:17 AM, Rohan Verma wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I recently attended ApacheCon Europe 2016 and wanted to share some insights
> and experiences.
> 
> - What do people know and how much people know about Apache Allura
> 
> From what I observed, people from North America seem to know about Allura
> but don't know that it has more features than Git/Hg. Apart from North
> Americans, people only seem to recall what Allura does when SourceForge is
> mentioned.
> 
> I heard of Apache Allura being mentioned twice in the sessions of the
> Conference at a Keynote and at a talk by Jim Jagielski and feel there is a
> lot of interest in the community after they hear about the project but
> since the project is not that exposed to the community, people are hesitant
> to use it. But after explaining and talking about it, people get very
> interested as it solves a lot of their problems. Although, inevitably
> Github, and the Atlassian Suite come up in the conversation.
> 
> - Response after Presentation at the Apache BarCamp
> 
> I had the chance to present at the BarCamp and was able to demonstrate
> (nearly) all the features of Allura. There was a diverse crowd and many
> people from the COMDEV and UI/UX field as well. What most people liked was
> how integrated all the features felt but found it difficult to use on the
> first go.

Any specific suggestions what could be better?

> 
> The person from COMDEV, was interested to see the Wiki and Blog since it's
> an important part of Community development and since at Apache, Community
> comes first before Code. She felt that having a single point of entry for
> Apache projects at an open source platform would greatly enhance community
> development.
> 
> A person from the Apache Solr team wanted to see more Solr being used,
> especially the new features and believes it would add value to the project.
> 
> A topic that was being discussed at the BarCamp before I began was how
> Github, Slack, and IRC are a bit off-track from the Apache way in the
> context of the "If it didn't happen on the mailing list, it did not happen"
> and therefore, Apache Allura stands out due to the ability of being able to
> email everything to the list.
> 
> A new idea that popped into my mind to solve the issue with IRC and the
> Mailing List was to develop an API endpoint for the IRC logger plugin to be
> able to send an email from a certain point. So, a meeting bot for IRC can
> be created that logs a meeting on IRC and in the end calls the API endpoint
> to email to the list at the end of the meeting. Also, if we could add the
> text of the IRC logger into the Solr Search it would be great.
> 

That would be nice.  The IRC chats do get saved as Artifacts, and thus indexed
for search already.

> Another part of the project that stood out to a person involved with
> Incubators was the Activity feed. He said that if that could be worked upon
> to be made a bit better, it will lead to reducing the pain of the people on
> the board to see the progress of podlings. He also wanted to see Merge
> Requests to be on the mailing list.

I'd like to see that too, so everyone can know that they are happening.  Ticket
https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/tickets/8111/

> 
> --
> 
> Another thing I would like to mention is that this would be the time to get
> involved with trying to setup a forge for the whole ASF projects since
> right now a lot work is being done to upgrade. For eg. recently the mailing
> list viewer was updated. See lists.apache.org
> 
> So I wish to end with some things that I propose that we could start with
> from the middle of December, if convenient for everyone. (I really haven't
> been able to devote any appreciable amount of time to the development of
> the project during this semester, and therefore I'm now planning on working
> only after my semester ends)
> 
> - Complete and push the JIRA importer
> - Collaborate on a Roadmap for the project
> - Clean the issues pending in the tracker
> - Make a twitter handle and increase outreach
> - Collaborate on COMDEV and post an email there to invite people to try
> Allura
> - Maybe mirror to forge.allura.org
> - Collaborate and talk to the Infra team
> 
> Also, please share your ideas and suggestions.
> 

I like all of your ideas.  https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/wiki/Goals/
has some broader goals listed, things that take more than 1 or 2 tickets to
accomplish.  A specific roadmap can be challenging since we don't all know what
we'll have time to work on, or new ideas we get in the future.


-- 
Dave Brondsema : dave@brondsema.net
http://www.brondsema.net : personal
http://www.splike.com : programming
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