Aldert,
"
Not a well coordinated community". Having looked at a
lot of open source communities I would have to dispute this
assertion pretty strongly. We have never forked and
things that get developed tend to be done with some consideration of what the community would like to see.
I think you are confusing being resource constrained
with not being coordinated. If OpenACS were a commercial
product it would
The notion that you can "restructure the community" by
fiat betrays a pretty profound misunderstanding of
what community means.
I just don't know how you can build a roadmap for non-funded volunteer work or make paid client work conform to a community consensus roadmap. I do think we could write a "where do we want to go" type of roadmap but I don't think we could attach a timeline to that.
That said, I just don't think what matters most for marketing is whatever wishes and empty promises we put
on some "roadmap", what matters are the things you mentioned: easy installation and making what we already
have look and work better.
One aspect I would hope would come out of a marketing discussion would be what sorts of live demo sites
would best showcase what people care about from openacs.
I would also like to see the companies who have built real
sites to put together a page with links to the "best examples" of what people are doing with openacs. There are
good sites out there that are a testimony to what openacs
can do but it's not easy to seperate the wheat from the chafe.
