Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Any comment from the community?
It's stupid because it lists symptoms and doesn't address the core issue. This makes it also a bit dissapointing because you have been around since the beginning and are still adressing the wrong points.
THE CORE ISSUE IS DEFINE AS FOLLOWS: the key developers are billed out at 100%.
Thats it. No more no less. Core devs are busy paying the bills and working on complicated OPENACS based projects, and can only spare a few hours here beyond that. If you waste a single sentence beyond this, you are simply listing symptoms of that core issue. This is nothing unique to openacs, all projects suffer from this, just look at Vista and the royal disaster that has turned out to be from a company that CAN afford full time devs. I can pick appart any of your PHP based examples in a nanosecond if you like based on the same grounds we are critiquing oacs.
Yes I am giving you a bit of a hard time, mostly because your article does nothing to help the situation.
PUTTING MY WALLET WHERE MY MOUTH IS:
Please allow me to take the opportunity to engage you and see if we can work together on some of these issues. Here is my plan for contributing to the project and I am slowly achieving it:
1. I started out on the Documentation project with Torben, however it turned out that the doc project is so big that two people aren't enough firstly, and secondly we need a project manager tool to co-ordinate the effort.
2. Therefore that project is still ongoing but stalled for the moment as I have doubled back to do the following:
a) I have hired a programmer to help me propose a redesign of the website using off the shelf oacs components. We have it done, I just need to finish up some graphics and we would like to present it to OCT for evaluation and critique. Then after a few rounds of making sure everyone is happy we hope to publish an updated website. In other words, instead of publicly listing ONLY NEGATIVES (all projects have a balance sheet of positives and negatives ... listing only negatives is a VERY VERY BIG NO NO from a marketing standpoint ... congratulations you just did it to your own favourite project), I put my wallet where my mouth is and hired someone to help. *HINT* *HINT*
b) the goal of the redesign is twofold: slightly updated look and also we want to show what a user can get out of the box with oacs WITHOUT any programming.
c) a tertiary goal of the website update is to allow us a place to mount calendar visibly so we can schedule group events.
d) another goal of the website is to allow us to mount project manager on the website visibly for those projects and users that want it. It should allow us to manage large projects more effectively. Primarily pm is meant to let me and torben co-ordinate the documenation project BECAUSE it requires a lot of people working on small chunks of data at a time. Two guys is not enough, we need 20 to 40 people picking up a couple of pages a piece and working on them and only pm can allow us to track that, any other approach is a disaster. However, pm can be used by other projects, some of which you have listed.
e) once we have shown what you can get from oacs with a default install we will try to convince OCT to invest time and resources to make sure with the install of one metapackage we can get nice published website out of the door for a user. This will be our first ease of use project to be done.
f) once we have that done I intend to, with the permission of OCT, to engage EVERYONE ... and i mean EVERYONE on the openacs registered list. I don't care if most of them are spam bots and addys that don't exist. I would like to engage whoever is awake in the community or still keeps an eye out there to help out with documentation. The documenation project needs 20 to 40 people to work on updates and re-organization under the leadership of one project manager (currently thats torben, but i'm co-ordinating with him).
g) the next goal ease of install. There are three projects right now under way for this:
FIRST: source install ... i have one master bash script that uses Maltes install scripts to download EVERYTHIGN from source and install it with one command. Malte has requested i forward that to him, he will package everything up into one giant tar that includes all the sources as a reference and that way we can even offer installs either from cvs or publish specific source reference releases.
SECOND: Debian packaging. There are several projects under way to package oacs and oacs apps for debian. This needs to be followed up on, however worst case scenario, we can always modify my and Maltes scripts to just spit out debs.
THIRD: I have a reference debian base vmware image sitting right here. I use it to test oacs source installs and use it to run my own oacs installs. Now because I am a novice I am not comforteable releaseing a preinstalled oacs debian vmware image but i can do it in about the time it takes to upload it to oacs. I would say this should come last after the scripts and debian packages tho.
h) once we have those pieces in place THEN and ONLY THEN we go out and start making some noise in the greater community. Until we can provide support services to the greater developer community (by this i mean for $$'s ... i know this is available its just not presented properly on the website) and meet some obligations on a time and delivery basis doing a rah rah sort of deal will only bite us in the ass BEACUSE ... well because your article is really WHY it will bite us in the ass. Developers tend to look at a project superficially and from their own 'I need it now' perspective - the bias tends to be that because there is a precieved notion that its hard to get into therefore it is. The exact opposite is true however we haveto polish off the speed bumps a bit first for easier entry.
So, thats what I'M doing to help.
How can we collaborate to continue pushing OPENACS forward? And yes I too am 100% billed out and have no time to spare ... heh! But your help would greatly be appreciated on ANY of the above.
Feel free to contact me via IRC on #freenode (nick: holycow), or via email.
- Rob
