Baron Schwartz wrote:
Just to play devil's advocate. Don't hate me :-) Drizzle has a great
dev community, but I'm just writing to encourage everyone to reach out
more to users. For example, at the upcoming MySQL conference, I see a
tutorial "Getting involved in Drizzle Development", and another
"Drizzle Storage Engine Development. Practical Example with BlitzDB".
Both sound wicked cool and interesting to about 10 possible attendees,
9 of whom are already active committers to Drizzle.
Hehe, yeah. There wasn't any coordination between any of the folks who
submitted tutorials regarding Drizzle, and its funny how similarly
dev-focused all three Drizzle tutorials were...
All three should be great tutorials, but you are correct, it will be
unlikely that either tutorial you cite about will draw more than 20 or
so people.
> Maybe I am
underestimating the interest in developing Drizzle or developing
plugins for it, I don't know. But I feel that at some point, there
has to be an on-ramp for users, not just developers.
No, I don't think you are underestimating the interest in developing
plugins. I think the issue, up until this point, has been that most of
the interesting things about Drizzle have been in the arena of enabling
more productive development of both plugins and the kernel.
You are absolutely correct that a focus on the user community is
essential, particularly after the Bell milestone release at the end of
January. It's not enough to open up the developer community. The
user community must also be nourished. I hope we can keep the same
strengths of the developer community (transparency, honest
communication, enthusiasm, valuing open source libraries and willingness
to try new things) alive in the user community as well.
So, what are the things that nourish a user community? Here's my list:
* An open and embracing attitude towards "newbies" and folks who "just
want to get things done"
* A strict policy of "no bashing, no blaming and no flaming"
* Establishing an infrastructure which *allows users to create
sub-communities that reflect shared interests*. For Drizzle, with its
emphasis on plugins, this is a critical piece of the community puzzle.
* Enable community-driven documentation. Drizzle is not able to use
MySQL's documentation, and due to the many changes made to Drizzle,
MySQL's documentation does not apply to many things in Drizzle. I
believe one of the first things the Drizzle user community should do is
focus on a wiki-based community documentation project to extend the
existing documentation pages into a more solid and robust documentation
that is entirely free of licensing issues (e.g. use a Creative Commons
share-alike license)
* Share use case stories. When the first round of users begin to use
Drizzle for production uses, the community should document their stories
on the Drizzle wiki to encourage the adoption and growth of Drizzle.
* Continue work on integrating with as many other open source projects.
Marcus Eriksson has been doing an amazing job integrating Drizzle with
other projects via RabbitReplication, but our user community can and
should focus on areas where Drizzle interacts with other open source
projects.
* Nourish the relationship between the developer community and the user
community. One of the mistakes many open source projects make is having
a big wall between developers and users. Our developer community has
tried hard to enable transparency in what we do, but we must find ways
to give the user community a clear line of sight into what we do as
developers and allow the user community to definitively and effectively
influence the direction that Drizzle should go in the future. No more
cathedrals.
Cheers,
jay
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