Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] nms project - moving forward

SourceForge Headquarters 1320 Columbia Street Suite 310 San Diego, CA 92101 +1 (858) 422-6466

Hi Everyone,

I've been one of the quiet ones for a very long time, being very busy
with University and all. There are mainly two things I'd like to
mention:

1. I agree with these organizational measures to a certain extent.
   Giving a smaller group feeling might boost the willingness of
   developpers to put effort into it. It also allows developpers to get
   more familiar with one script. On the flip side I also have some
   issues with them. First this is an open source project to which
   people *volunteer* their own time to. This is one of the greatest
   thing about open source, but can also be it's pin in the foot. I
   don't think going about beating on people because they don't put
   enough effort into it is a good thing. You're more likely to scare
   people away then attract them. Second, the group thing might not work
   if one group ends up not having time to volunteer in which case some
   scripts will be left out of development and support (which I guess
   couldn't be that much worse than right now, but no better either).

2. I don't have much time to volunteer and don't want to "lead" any
   group. That said, if someone wants to step up to that I'll gladly
   look over simple search.

-Olivier

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 04:35:41PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> Here are some thoughts about the nms project and its future. Thanks to
> Simon Wilcox for helping me thrash out some of the details. Please read
> all of this message.
> 
> The nms project is very successful. And I'm not convinced that we are
> properly geared up for that success. I don't want the project to be 
> forced to closed down, so I think we have to change the way we work.
> 
> I think we're having two major problems.
> 
> * Very small number of people involved in support.
> 
>   We have 65 people on the developers mailing list. But I think there
>   have been about five people who have answered a support question in
>   the last two months. I am, of course, eternally grateful to those 
>   people for the time they put it, but if we keep relying on a such
>   a small number of people they will come under more and more pressure
>   until they decide they can't be bothered any more and leave the 
>   project.
> 
>   There are also a small (but growing, I think) number of support emails
>   that just don't get answered. This makes the project look bad. One of
>   the things that is supposed to differentiate between us and Matt Wright
>   is that we have a good support system. For some people that doesn't
>   seem to be true currently.
> 
>   There are enough of us that the support effort doesn't need to be very 
>   onerous for a small number of people. If we spread it out, each of us
>   would only need to deal with a very small number of emails.
> 
> * Very little development going on
> 
>   Nick Cleaton is doing great work on FormMail and TFMail, but they
>   seem to be the only programs that are moving forward. Once again I
>   have to wonder why we have 65 people on the development list if most
>   of them have no interest in doing any development.
> 
>   A few weeks ago, I posted several emails to the development list in
>   one afternoon. They were all ideas for improvements that came from
>   support requests. I posted them to the devel list hoping for a bit
>   of discussion about the suggestions followed by someone volunteering 
>   to take the project on. All of these emails were completely ignored.
> 
>   Simon also posted a number of emails to the devel list during 
>   December. This were also ignored (by me too, I'm sorry to admit).
> 
>   As with support, if people make suggestions for improvements to our
>   scripts and they are just ignored, then it makes us look bad.
> 
> 
> Ok. So those are the problems. Here are some suggestions for solutions.
> 
> I need to delegate responsibility for the development and support for the
> scripts. Already Nick pretty much controls FormMail and TFMail, but we
> need to take that further.
> 
> I suggest that Nick gets a group of about four or five volunteers to help
> him develop and support FormMail and TFMail. This group will be 
> responsible for handling all support email on these scripts and for making
> new releases available.
> 
> We'll also create smaller groups that do the same for the other scripts.
> We'll probably need separate groups for wwwboard, search and guestbook as
> (after formmail) they are the most commonly used. The other scripts can
> probably all be dealt with by a single group.
> 
> These groups will also be responsible within themselves for assign rotas
> of people who will deal with support issues. These will designate a
> "first line support" person. This person will be able to call on other
> people within the group to help them solve problems that they can't work
> out on their own.
> 
> I also intend to make the developers mailing list closed. So that only 
> people who are in one of these support groups will be subscribed to the
> list.
> 
> In order to foster more of a feeling of responsibility towards the 
> scripts I'd like to introduce a "team bios" page on the web page so that
> people can see who's who on the project.
> 
> And speaking of the web site, it needs an overhaul so I'd like to create
> another group that is responsible for that. Amongst the things I'd like 
> them to look at are:
> 
> * Team bios page
> 
> * Script documentation on the web site
>   (even better if it's auto-generated from the README files as a
>   script is released).
> 
> * Script demos on the web site
> 
> * More FAQs
>   Perhaps even some kind of "knowledge base" or wiki.
> 
> * Announcements
>   I'd like to encourage people to sign up to a new announcements list
>   when they download our scripts. They will then get automatic emails
>   when a new version is released. This announcements should also be 
>   listed on the web site.
> 
> * Articles
>   Useful articles for CGI beginners. Things like "idiots guide to 
>   debugging a CGI script".
> 
> Well, that's about all for now. Please let mw know what you think.
> 
> I really think that if we don't do something soon, then the project is
> in danger of being overwhelmed.
> 
> Thanks for listening,
> 
> Dave...
> 
> -- 
>   Drugs are just bad m'kay
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.NET email is sponsored by:
> SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
> http://www.vasoftware.com
> _______________________________________________
> Nms-cgi-devel mailing list
> Nms...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nms-cgi-devel

-- 
                  __-/|    ? ?     |\-__
             __--/  /  \   (^^)   /  \  \--__
          _-/   /   /   \ / ( )  /   \   \   \-_
         /  /   /  /     ~(  ^^ ~     \  \   \  \
         / Oli Dragon    dr...@sh... \
        /  Sfwr Eng III  (  McMaster University  \
        /  /  /     __--_ (   ) __--__     \  \  \
        |  /  /  _/        \_ \_       \_  \  \  |
         \/  / _/            \_ \_       \_ \  \/
          \_/ /                -\_\        \ \_/
            \/                   -)         \/
                                *~
 ___--<******************************************************>--___
[http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=olivier+dragon&op=index]
 ~~~--<******************************************************>--~~~