[Arianne-general] Arianne-general] [Prj Mngmnt]

[Euan M. <lu...@co...>]

Having lurked for a bit, I'd like to raise some comments for discussion.

My early impression are that the project is going relatively slow. (It's a 
volunteers-only affair, with a fairly major learning curve, so no surprises 
there).

But given the age of the development process, it would be reasonable to 
expect to be at a faster moving stage now.

The key reasons seem to me to be:
The lack of explicitly defined processes.
  Many fundamental ones ones seem to be created on-the-fly while in live
   use.  And are re-created differently each time they're used.   sometimes
   just a little.  Sometimes a lot.

  Among these - there does not seem to be a clearly known or understood
  decision -making process.  Certainly not one that is explicitly defined,
  and that newcomers can refer to.

There is a common-reference facility (www.arianne.cx) that does not hold 
many of the useful reference documents.  Particularly the working (i.e. 'not-
frozen') documents.

Project management tasks seem to be left as a low priority, leaving the 
non-prj mngmnt workload concentrated on a few key players who have had 
a long time to get used to the way things happen.

Folk seem to be doing stuff without the group even knowing that it's being 
done, never  mind why it's being done, or having the chance to contribute 
comments at the outset.

Additionally, the adoption of English as  the standard language presumes a 
degree of fluency which may well not exist.  (As a native English-speaker, I 
have difficulty following many of the points discussed). When sentences 
are ambiguously or unclearly translated into English, it becomes even less 
likely that other non-English speaakers will interpret them correctly.

Standards, decisions and guidelines which are misunderstood can mean 
lots of code that needs to be undone, and then done again.

This is a major risk, IMO, especially as the number of contributors 
increases.

Does anyone agree or disagree with these points?  Does anyone have any 
ideas for how to eliminate the problems, or minimise the effect of them?
Cheers,
     Euan