Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Open Source and business thoughts

It's not that we are saying competition is bad, that we want someone else to do the documentation or that we would rather have the community do the marketing for the OpenACS shops. Rather, we (or at least for sure I am) are saying that the current set up is untenable for the community to continue growing.

Competition among the shops is healthy, and I think important. It drives us all to innovate our development approaches and what makes us unique. Hopefully, as things shake out each shop becomes particulalry good in a certain area and becomes the premier shop in a vertical market.

However, OpenACS is suffering from a serious case of Invisibility. Very few people know about it and fewer know what the hell it does. This is obviously bad because an Open Source community must have new blood, ideas and energy in order to survive successfully. I do not want to see this community become hermetic, which it has appeared to be at times.

So I what I, and I think the others are as well, advocating is coalition of independent developers and shops to ensure a more stable and growing community. I've tried to do this with the OpenACS socials and am eager to set more up. But given the global identity of the OpenACS, clearly more needs to be done.

I think the first step is to decentralize the some of the authority in the project. I understand that more people need to submit news, but most of the community probably has 20 things on their plate and can't remember to send in a snippet of info, just like how you have forty things on your plate and may forget to accept the item.

What I suggest is spreading some of this authority among a central committee that would then establish some guidelines and rules. Among these, when should the next release be, what is the functionality that is most critical to the next generation, what new modules will be accepted to the core release, etc. None of these points are particularly new or exciting but they've have been incorporated into many other thriving open source communities successfully.

Of course, this process would be as completely democratic as any online process can be. These people should be members of the community that have contributed a great deal, are well respected and are fair and judicious. This committee would be asked to gather and recognize the best ideas from the boards and direct the community accordingly.

I think that the main strength of the OpenACS community is the wealth of extremely intelligent and committed developers and contributors. What I am suggesting is figuring out a way to leverage this advantage more structurally.

I know that you are not averse to these points, and I want to make it clear that I'm not attacking you. I am saying though that the community's center should begin to expand a bit.

talli

PS
Dan, thanks for correcting me and recognizing Neophytus' contribution.