Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

On Tuesday 01 January 2008 06:20, Martin Cooper wrote:
> Frankly, this has
> always seemed to me the most likely reason for the lack of discussion on
> the lists - the discussions are happening, but happening in person between
> people who work for the same company.

This is indeed a big mental barrier to overcome for companies in general. 
Moving from F2F discussions to "open development" is hard, and I must admit 
that even veterans like myself fall back to F2F occasionally.

However, I don't think that's the case here. Sounds more like a couple of 
(one?) developers continue progressing their "corner" of the codebase.

James, building community is hard, but XAP sits right on the money both in 
terms of technology hype/interest as well as "many eyes on ASF", so I think 
it should be a lot easier than many other podlings.

Mailing list activity is the number one gauge for external folks to make a 
risk assessment of "will this project survive/thrive"...


My suggestions;

 1) Start announcing development to be made. Both quite ahead of time in 
    abstract form, as well as nitty, gritty details as you work with it.

 2) Announce after-the-fact, what has been done in commits. Most people
    don't care reading commit logs, so sumarize rNNNNNN:MMMMMM this and that
    has been added/modified/deleted/changed... bla bla bla.

 3) There seems to be a fair bit of JIRA issues filed in the project. Try
    comment on those issues on the dev mailing list. Try to create a
    discussion of possible solutions, in parallel to the comments on the
    issue.

 4) There are 17 open NewFeature/Improvements in Jira right. These should
    serve as excellent starting points to discuss between the main developer,
    other developers and the reporter, what can/should be done.


Personally, I don't think web site and documentation is the critical parts in 
this particular case to bootstrap community. There are always hard-core 
people who can take what you have and put it in use. That said, for mass 
adoption, you probably need to improve docs in various areas. You will always 
hear complaints on docs from users, either too much, too little, wrong level 
of granularity, no overview, no details, can't find X, and so on... That is 
normal.


Cheers
-- 
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer

I  live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er
I  work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc
I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug

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