Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Requiring IZ and CVS is a *huge* barrier.
A related problem is that the policy at OOo, including Marketing,
appears to be to allow only a very few people to have commit access
through CVS.
Yes. OOo is trying to be a Cathedral and that just doesn't work well in
the open source world. Open source is a Bazaar. Examples come to mind
easily:
* When people asked the MP lead why she fired a MarCon the issue was
sent to the CC.
* When the MP prepares a slogan, it requires approval by the CC.
* Only about 3 people can edit the front page.
* As Jean just said, only a very few people can modify the MP site.
This is a Cathedral. Even in a closed source project I'd consider this
unnecessarily Cathedral-like. For example, in a closed source project
I'd expect the marketing department to be able to design a slogan
without contacting the CEO. And I'd expect the manager of the marketing
dept to be able to respond to an inquiry as to why she fired an employee.
The whole point of a wiki is to have a site that is easy to edit and
many people can edit. In other words, low barriers. The Cathedral model
is diametrically opposiste to this.
On at least two occasions during 2005 (after I finally got my SSH/CVS
access working on the Documentation Project) I offered to help keep the
Marketing Project's pages up to date, but my offers were rejected
because "we don't want to give too many people access".
That was my experience in the website team.
Results: (1)
continuing long delays to make the simplest changes, often resulting in
the changes being made too late for the events they related to and (2)
completely alienating a previously willing and enthusiastic volunteer.
I have seen quite a few willing and enthusiastic volunteers depart the
project. Some were very skilled and eager to do a project but they just
got tired of micromanagement and not seeing their efforts bear fruit.
It's stupid to have to file an issue to correct a few typos or add a bit
of time-critical information, which could be done in less time that it
takes to file the issue; and when those people who do have commit
privileges are ill or too busy to make the changes, the changes simply
don't get made.
I think that a better strategy would be to let people do work fairly
early on. Certainly if they seem willing. And if anyone abuses of the
priviledge then take it away. In my experience, malicious contributors
are extremely rare. And you don't need to lock down the site to keep it
sane. People don't just go around making changes without thought. In
fact, in my experience, people are very hesitant to change anything, and
you actually have to encourage them and try to convince them that
editing the wiki is ok.
At the OpenDocument Fellowship, about 100 people have edit access to the
front page. And we seem to manage just fine.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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