Hi, > But there are a few really big ones. These are reliant on our few > developers being able to take a break from fire-fighting, which we're > doing a lot of the time, and diving into them. It's great when this > happens
Maybe it would be worthwile to try to get more capable people on board, instead of squeezing the last bit of juice out of those we already have. If money is available, maybe it could be channeled towards setting up a true "dev" machine which has proper data (i.e. a fully loaded mysql with history tables and all), or even a few instances of that, so that people can put their ideas to test there. Maybe "testing" would be a better name than "dev"; I would still expect people to have their own machines available for development but working with massive amounts of data is one of the core things in our project and not everyone has the tools at home to do a real-world performance comparison between various ways of implementing an interface. We also need to work on our culture. It is not enough to spot a problem and bury oneself into it, especially if you're one of the few people who happens to have those few more buttons that the others don't have. Every problem needs to be looked at from the angle: Is this something we need our core people to DO, or would it be sufficient for our core people to offer a few insights on how it could/should be done and then it can be done by someone else? I don't have the magic recipe to end all problems but surely reaching out to new people is immensely important and we need to find more and better ways to do it. We must not desecend into cynicism vis-a-vis new people on the lists, yes there's a proportion of people who think they've been here for two days and know everything better and I don't like them either but maybe they really do, sometimes, or even if they don't know everything better we could perhaps use their help. I started the "Things to do" page on the Wiki in May last year as a result from a similar "we need more developers" discussion. It may need a bit of an overhaul, the "export tab" thing for example is still listed as open and not being done by anybody, but I still think the main effort is really really identifying and documenting the tasks we want done, and putting developers that don't happen to be [EMAIL PROTECTED] in a position to effectively work on them and give them the warm fuzzy feeling that their contribution is really sought after. These things will find us people to do the job - money may also be a factor but I'm sure it is further down the list. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
