Since my contributions to date have not been substational, I have held back posting my thoughts publically. I have sent my thoughts and comments to Ben and I'll summarize them a bit here. Hopefully everybody will accept the fact that I'm not out to tick off anybody, as that is not my intention.
As I see it because of serveral changes in the past few months, OpenACS has seen a large growth in the community itself. That growth has pointed out a few areas that need to be improved or areas that previously had not been examined, that now are. It is a good sign this is happening and despite, as I see it, that the current "gatekeepers" are handling it fairly well it is a situation where conflict is usually unavoidable. The very nature of a project of this type is that conflicts will happen. I think by accepting that and working to correct the problems show that the current powers that be are working in the right direction.
I make no assumtions on people's motivations other than everybody wants to work for the common good (naive, I know) and that people not working for that will be "flushed out". Also some people just don't play well together (for whatever personal reasons) but if the community is strong those problems will auto-correct themselves.
I think the community may need to sit back and re-think its goals
(ie: what are we trying to do). Obviously this will always be a moving target and this may fall in and out of focus. As I see it, OpenACS is now the sole contributor/development community behind ACS/TCL. aD's recent changes has seem to brought quite a few people to the community that are from the ACS/TCL/Oralce fold (at least in
my view) as we may need to address that. We may also choose to NOT address that.
While the website is an imporant issue and it nice to see people will to put time towards it, unless we have a good idea of what we are truly trying to do, I think there will be a problem in developing a website that reflects that.
I personally find if difficult to get information about patches, changes, etc. This comes from my laziness as I don't like to look
all over the place for that information. It would be nice to look
at centralizing that information.
Those are just my thoughts about the current state of affairs.
Thanks,
Mat Kovach
