2013/7/8 Thomas Neidhart <thomas.neidh...@gmail.com> > On 07/04/2013 10:20 PM, Benedikt Ritter wrote: > > Hi, > > > > we had this discussion lately where we talked about attracting new > > contributors for commons [1]. Over the past few days I've been thinking > > about this topic again and I've come to the conclusion that there are > > several things we could do to improve our "public relations". > > > > Here is a list of things that I would like to change (and by this I mean, > > that I volunteer to do the work ;-) > > > > 1. Make commons more visible in coding social media > > - request git mirrors for every proper component, so that everything is > > also at github > > - add all proper components to Ohloh (and clean up the existing ones) > > - create a Twitter account where we can post news from commons. The > Mesos > > project already has such an account. [2] > > > > 2. Make the website more attractive > > - Use a modern design - I don't know who said it, but I loved it when > > someone said "our website looks like we're java 1.3 users". Well, this is > > true. Simone made several attempts to make commons switch to the maven > > fluido skin [3,4,5]. I think the time has come to finally do something > > about the website. > > I like the design of the log4j2 site, I am unsure if it is based on > fluido or actually the same, but something like this I would like to see > for commons too. The current design looks so old and rusty and can give > a wrong impression on the state of the project. Website design in > general and of open-source projects has greatly improved in the last > couple of years, we should not stay behind. >
It is fluido, as far as I know. I'm planning to start working on the website in two weeks. > > I am not so much into the social coding stuff, although I find it quite > nice, especially if somebody else handles it ;-). > > Otoh, the single most important factor to attract users and/or > contributors is simply to actively maintain the project and try to be > better than competing libs, imho. There are several examples of > components that were probably great a few years ago, but are now way > behind other libs in terms of features, usability, java language > support, community. > Personally, I think we should be more open to deprecate components that > are not maintained for years and have better alternatives. Right now, > commons sometimes looks like a graveyard of once cool stuff (with a few > exceptions). Cut it down to well maintained and really used libs, and > probably more people will think that commons is a good place to develop > new stuff / components. > Yes, I agree. There are two other things I have in mind about our components. 1. I'd like to make it easier for users to identify which components may be of interest for them. One way to accomplish this would be to introduce categories like they did in the wikipedia article about commons [1] 2. I came across the Leiningen project [2] lately. In their bug tracker they use a newbie tag to mark issues that may be a good starting point for people who want to get involved. I wonder if this makes sense for us too? I've talked to several people who wanted to get involved but didn't know where to start. Benedikt [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Commons [2] http://leiningen.org/ > > Thomas > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org > > -- http://people.apache.org/~britter/ http://www.systemoutprintln.de/ http://twitter.com/BenediktRitter http://github.com/britter
