From: Pascal R. <pr...@ma...> - 2012-02-24 13:12:47
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>> A couple of weeks ago, I compiled a sort of Community Roadmap, based on ideas that was shared in the working group and in the surveys. The (quite long) list is on the wiki: >> >> http://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/WOCOM/Community+Roadmap >> >> As you can see, it's a pretty long list… And the problem is: who is going to work on those? And this is where my rant is coming to… Ok, it's not really a rant, but anyway. >> >> Problem we are facing is that the vast majority said in the surveys that you want to keep using WO (we are still loosing at least 10% of the community every year). So we need to improve things but a handful of people are improving things. I'm not expecting that the majority of the community contributes, I never saw a community where the majority contribute. >> >> Also, we don't have any support from Apple and we don't have big corporate sponsors (and most places who develops with WO are one or two guy teams). We need to find a way to get things done. Should we have people being paid for work on the community? Have employees? > > I don't see how we can do that. No one wants them done badly enough to pay for them now, otherwise someone would have a job doing just that. I think most things get added either when a company has a business need and donates the code to Wonder, or Mike gets infected with a desire to try out something. Still, in the past we had Apple who paid for WOLips and Wonder contributions (well, because they needed it themselves), but that's no longer the case. So yes, people will continue to contribute to Wonder by contributing stuff they use themselves, but we need maintenance (WOLips working on new versions of Eclipse, fix for Java 7, etc.) and probably a exit strategy by "porting" Wonder to Cayenne and Tapestry. Sure, the core WO stuff is solid but it will not benefit from new Java stuff and patching the core than be a daunting task. We discussed this at WOWODC 2011 and in the working group, and I agree that we should move, in the long term, Wonder on top of open source projects. So that means that Wonder should have cover methods so that we don't use directly the core APIs to make it easier to move to a Wonder version sitting on top of Cayenne or something else. Like I said, it's long term, but we need to start doing soon and we will need people and cash to do it. > >> How can we deal with the fact that most WO experts are working for Apple, leaving the community or are just too busy? Sometimes, I think that WOWODC 2012 should be the last community-driven thing and that the community should just die. >> >> And as for a personal note: I tried to drive by leadership, and I failed. Maybe the community need a new leader (but at the same time, nobody appointed me as a leader, so it's a bit pretentious from me to say that I'm a leader). > > I don't think we are very leader friendly. You might have more luck herding cats. :-) Your efforts are appreciated, we would be much worse off without you. > > > Chuck > > -- > Chuck Hill Senior Consultant / VP Development > > Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific problems. > http://www.global-village.net/gvc/practical_webobjects > > > > > > > > |