On 01/11/2012 Rob Weir wrote:
On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 4:21 PM, jan iversen wrote:
- We need to focus more on people who want to help, instead of using all
the legal stuff (which are necessary) as a buffer not to move things. (e.g.
I got 2 volunteers working on a danish translation, highly motivated, now
we are discussing details about how to release the stuff). ...
I don't think anyone is using "legal stuff' to prevent things from
moving forward.
There is a bit of confusion here. One thing is allowing volunteers to
have feedback on their work, the other one is releasing their work. For
feedback we needn't focus on legal issues. So the Danish translation as
discussed in
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121179
will be integrated in any next 3.4.x (informal, i.e., "snapshots")
builds. The "legal stuff" is not playing any roles here.
But it is certainly true that a new volunteer is encouraged the best
when they can contribute today and see their results released
tomorrow.
I'd focus on "used" rather than "released": it is more motivating to see
their results used (i.e., a snapshot build) soon than to see them
released after months. And this is where we should improve. To give
volunteers feedback we only need a very lightweight process, ideally zero.
What is delaying us with the current translations, for example, is just
that we need to determine a suitable deadline for translators to check
in their PO files, integrating them on
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/ooo/branches/AOO34/ and building
snapshot for AOO34. At the moment this is indeed quite demanding on
Juergen and Ariel.
- I think events like ApacheCon is nice, but events like FOSDEM is quite a
lot more important for the "ordinary" openSource developer.
And we are planning a dev room at Fosdem for that reason.
By FOSDEM (and ideally much earlier) we must be ready to integrate new
volunteers in a way that fully satisfies them and the project. This is a
priority for OpenOffice as a project.
We are getting close to this for what concerns localization: I expect
that in a couple weeks we will be able to involve, engage and satisfy
localization volunteers with an established process. We must then do the
same for QA, development, Marketing...
An important result we should achieve is that nobody should feel
frustrated by not having committer privileges: it is also up to us to
define tasks that can be done without depending too much on a committer
helping the contributor. At least we should warn them: if someone wants
to rebuild an entire section of the OpenOffice website, like it is
happening with Jan, he should be told in advance that this contribution
is really welcome (and that, for most sections, we really need it!) but
that at a certain point he might feel frustration for not being a
committer. There are hundreds of tasks that can be done by
non-committers, and we should keep the distinction clear when we
advertise tasks for volunteers. (That said, the "privileges" of being a
committer or a PMC member are greatly exaggerated at times... it's not
that much really; but when this is the only obstacle to getting things
really done, I can understand the impatience).
Regards,
Andrea.
