Andy,
And what I can tell you is that people in OSM (I mean admins here)
are very supportive and open to changes.
I'm glad to hear that! Many people say they have a different
experience, but we try to be helpful.
Well, I don't know about other people, but I got everything I needed
(and much more than I imagined!) in terms of hardware, day-to-day
support etc.
In fact, I am a bit ashamed that given all the admin support I still
have not managed to finish what I set out to accomplish! :/
So yeah, I can say that again - for people who want to do stuff, sky is
the limit in OSM ;-)
Sadly, I simply don't have enough time to finish it to the extent
that it is acceptable (to me, not to mention others/admins) to
consider it for production use.
I think many of our software projects have similar issues, and one
of the key aspects is to try to get more than one volunteer to
develop each one.
I'm currently working on improving the documentation for the rails
port (with a view to making it easier for new developers to get
started).
That's a great initiative. Honestly, I have no idea where to best invest
time to raise the probability of attracting new contributors.
At the time when I was briefly attending EWG weekly sessions I really
thought about this a lot. What makes people decide they want to spend
their free time on a project? I reached some crazy conclusions that it
may even be that documentation is not a blocking issue - if someone
really wants to contribute, they will find their way. Where to get more
people like that? No idea.
Perhaps the project itself needs to be more "sexy"? I know that for some
developers (myself included) end users are one of the most important
aspects - i.e. they would rather develop for a project that is actually
used in the wild (of course I'm not saying that OSM isn't used but
certainly there are some things to be improved?).
When I finish with that, do you think that your OWL project could
benefit from something similar? Or are there other things that you
think are holding back other developers from getting started?
Ehh... OWL is a tricky topic. In the past few months there were a couple
of people who seemed interested in contributing but I think they got
stuck at the setup stage and/or understanding the code.
I really need to try and simplify some of the implementation, document
it better etc. Perhaps I should consider narrowing the scope for OWL,
right now I think I may be trying to tackle too many issues at once -
and that's why the amount of code and its complexity is growing and also
why I am not able to deliver anything.
Currently I am thinking about making OWL a bit leaner and perhaps
separating some of the stuff (like vector tiles and integration with
client-side rendering) to other (future) projects.
I think in OSM we will (slowly but surely!) get to the tipping point and
more contributors will come.
Paweł
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