I think the OpenACS community is gonna win either way. This
is a very good sign for a shift away from the AOL team being
in complete control of the software to letting the
community have a real voice. They seem very sincere in this
and most of the AOLserver community that I talk with are
very excited. The AOLserver open source community is very
in touch with the OpenACS community and patches/ideas/modules
that come from OpenACS or elsewhere are going to get much
better consideration and treatment I think under the new system.
I think the members of the community that wish to be on the
core team need to:
- Have very good knowledge of the C code and structure of the codebase
- Be able to attend or keep up with the AOLserver chats that occur weekly
- Work on communication from/to the rest of the community about what thoughts are going on and where things are going or need to go
- Be able to review/ make suggestions on new modules to conform to the new engineering standards for code/docs/testing
that are being established now.
- Most likely be responsible for at least one AOLserver module (their own or an abandonded one)
- Follow the AOLserver mailing list and contribute when possible
While I consider myself a pretty active member of the AOLserver community (I was the first and only person to attend the weekly chats, Daniel Stasinski and myself are probably tied for most chats attended, have created a few AOLserver articles, have a given a presentation on AOLserver at NOVALUG, and various other activities) I do not consider
myself eligible to be on the core. I don't think that is a
bad thing because I have seen the quality of the other
members of the community whom I feel much better qualified.
The real point of this is that while I think there are
a few people that might be a good fit for the core group in the OpenACS community, it shouldn't be thought of a
as a necessary thing for OpenACS to have representation in the core. Its all good either way IMHO but don't think
the OpenACS will miss out if not directly represented.
- Carl Garland
