I think we have gotten clear viewpoints why some people have been using OpenACS. As promised we will write a feedback system in OpenACS for 5.3 which will report back data collected in installations, which should give you an idea how many people are using a certain package (okay, have installed a certain package).
Regarding the bugs in bugtracker, it would be great if we could get someone to work on the testservers and figure out if a bug still exists and mark it as still existing somewhere or mark it as fixed in release xyz. I have the slight suspicion that quite some bugs have already been fixed in the packages, though others have been introduced.
Another thing to do would be to have a page on OpenACS which allows people to say “I work on this package” (in addition to the report mentioned above that says “I use this package”) and send them a link every six months to say if they are still working on the package or not. This should give you an idea if a package is actively maintained and who the people working on it are, in contrast to having a maintainer ( I don’t think we can follow through with the concept of maintainers for packages, as too many people work on a package at the same time).
Last but not least, we should ask people:
“What functionality do you miss on OpenACS.org for your daily work”.
Noone says the ideas I mentioned above would be useful and acceptable to people, though the reporting got a TIP, therefore I assume it is useful.
And let me point out one thing: I am thrilled to see this discussion and all the valuable feedback. Thanks a lot for contributing this much. If we as a community manage to put the feedback into actual actions even the better.
