I appreciate that good and coherent documentation is important. Documentation in open-source projects tend to be continuously evolving, so if you're going to wait for that to be done before you do anything else, then we are going be like this for a long time. What I have stated needs to happen in parallel with the documentation evolving or at least presentations and blog posts. That's what many other successful projects have done and do, so I'm not sure why you think we'll do well by not doing it.
People also tend to get inspired by use cases even if they don't fully understand the mechanics of the underlying system. They will correlate a use case with their reality, possibly get curious and go learn more. From what I've seen, a lot of people end up getting involved in projects after they see a discussion about a similar use case that has been used successfully. Good documentation definitely helps once we have attracted the attention of a developer. I'm fine with not having frequently releases if we don't have a good flow of contributions, but once we start having more contributions, it is important that users see their contributions in releases. Finally, it is good if the report includes more than just the immediate stuff we need to do. Including a long term plan for developing the community would be a nice addition and I've already stated what I believe is important. -Flavio > On 09 Dec 2014, at 17:59, Ivan Kelly <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think, before any of that, we need coherent and complete user > documentation. Almost all the committers we have, have come because they have > used a system that used bookkeeper, and needed to understand what bookkeeper > was doing. None have come from the perspective of wanting to build a new > system with it. > > Right now, if someone came to the site and tried build something with > bookkeeper, they'd lost. We need to make it so that someone with only a > cursory knowledge of distributed systems can get started. Once that barrier > is down, getting more people and usecases should be easier. > > -Ivan > > On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Flavio Junqueira > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > The options I know for community growth are: > - Frequent releases to make sure we incorporate patches of the various > contributors and so that we can new committers joining.- Talks in various > visible events like ApacheCon, Strata, etc.- Meetups in different locations > to attract new contributors. > - Blog posts about the project, use cases, etc. > Increasing the frequency of releases is probably a good idea, something like > one every 3-4 months just to have a reference. > -Flavio >
