I was asking on irc (#debian-jr on irc.openprojects.net) last night about what would make the most impact on our web site. The most important idea that came up is the need for a roadmap, or milestones. Someone said "like the Mozilla milestones[1] except without the dates". The idea is to have the milestones made up of measurable tasks that address certain of our goals. There was consensus last night that attaching specific dates to our timeline is not a great idea. Deadline pressure rarely accomplishes what it intends to accomplish. Doubly so with volunteer projects like ours. The potential for deadline slippage is enormous, and it will only hurt morale. So we'll stick to measuring "product" in ways other than "elapsed time", as it is such an arbitrary measure as to be worthless.
[1] See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milestones/index.html So let's give sketch this out. I think I know where I want to see the project go at least in the short-term, and I would like some help filling out and organizing the roadmap. I have organized these in no particular order with three parts, "goal" (from our web page[2]), "task", and "metrics". These are not sufficient in and of themselves for a roadmap because we will have to decide two more things, "sequence" and "quantification of metrics", or as someone eloquently put it last night, "how many foos do we need before we have a bar" :) I have only started to flesh out tasks and metrics under one of the goals. [2] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr - Goal: marketing & pr - Task: choose a logo - Metric: we have chosen a logo (duh :) - Task: establish external awareness of project - Metric: number of matches on google.com/linux?q=debian-jr (count only dissimilar matches) - Metric: number of times we are published by non-Debian sources - Task: establish internal awareness of project - Metric: number of inquiries by non-members about the project - Metric: number of people on mailing list - Task: attract volunteers for project - Metric: number of members actively making posts to the mailing list - Metric: number of members with one or more contributed packages or contribution of some other sort (logo, web page, review of a package, etc.) [ Actually, maybe we have missed a goal for this task that wasn't stated on our goals page, and that is "growth of the project". Or maybe that is just a subgoal of "marketing & pr"? I don't have a good feel for whether it needs a separately listed goal. ] For now, let's not go any further than listing these three things: goals, tasks and metrics. We can later decide what specific actions are needed to accomplish these tasks (and indeed, the actions themselves need not really be listed on the roadmap, which is an overview document and doesn't really get that specific). We can also decide later what order these things need to be done in, once we understand some of the dependencies in sequence between tasks. And at the end of the process we can group together a handful of things to do for each milestone and list specific quantifications of our chosen metrics which signal the completion of the task. Some of these tasks will undoubtedly need to be split across multiple milestones. We'll need to gauge the size of each thing somehow and try to decide how much of each task should be complete for each milestone. Anyway, if there are some goals that don't fit into any of the goals on the web page, or if anyone else can contribute a bit more to this beginning of a list, please speak up. I'd like to have something roughed out and linked from the web page at the end of this discussion period. I'm looking for breadth not depth at this point. So brainstorm away! Ben -- nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ pgp key fingerprint = 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ] [ gpg key fingerprint = 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ]
