Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to How long can the OpenACS community get away with being an island?
AFAICT Malte and Simon are now officially on the hook. I'll have to read this thread with more care before I can say I perfectly understand what they're on the hook for ... but they're nailed.
By this I mean those who step forward and volunteer get to lead. I think it's wonderful. My middle name is delegation. Or perhaps it is better to consider the (for lack of a better word) marketing aspect a separate project with its own leadership. I don't care how we look at it as a community - it needs doing, it needs leadership, it needs energy. Let's go!
Lars's point about the toolkit being more sizzle than steak, more promise than delivery at this point is true. Yes, many of us have built real sites on top of OpenACS 4 but ... it's still weaker in some regards than OpenACS 3. There's a lot of confusion within packages, some of which truly suck, most of which don't really make proper use o f the core tools (due mostly to a lack of guidance and communication between the core team and package implementors when parallel development was happening at a very rapid pace).
So, Simon, this isn't really a matter of the mania of developers for perfection. There are serious issues to be addressed. For instance last week I spent a day contracting with Sloan to help out with scalability issues uncovered by dotLRN. We've got lots o' stuff like this to deal with in the core.
That doesn't mean that it is unusable or that we need to hold off trying to attract attention to ourselves until all such things are fixed. Not at all. A roadmap that identifies brokenness and who might fix individual things and when would be a big help. It's also the kind of thing that will help keep new developer types around. If a new hacker stumbles across something that's strangely whacked out and broken in psychotic ways, but sees that it has been identified and is on a list of things to be fixed with a name attached to it, the hacker's less likely to decide we're stupid and our toolkit worse.
I've been talking for a couple of weeks now with a potential delgatee who is interested in taking over the task of managing the nuts-and-bolts of organizing the building of things like roadmaps, package ownership and status docs, etc etc. More later, perhaps in the next couple of days, by next week latest. This would be a great help to the project and a great help to me (because I don't currently have time to do the basic mechanics needed to communicate these basic items to the OpenACS 4 world, and haven't for months as has been obvious to all).
Building the roadmap needs to be a collaborative event among those who know the core well and presumably have been thinking about it. Lars and myself are two who've participated in this thread who have already discussed some of the issues both in person and via e-mail (and Peter was with us when we talked in person). There are others.
Having a parallel effort on the other end, led by the likes of Malte and Simon, would be fantastic ...
Peter's comments about technical hubris are well-taken. I would hope that we, as a community, don't suffer from that. We aren't the only smart kids on the block. We just have more fun :)
