Last week, I had a long talk with Anne and we are both worried about the current rate of development. If you look at a list of svn commits from the last month or so, you will just see commits from Vassil working on the Twitter API and Actions. As a sign of the current malaise in the project, there is currently no active sprint and no one has committed to performing any tasks in the non-existent sprint.
Initially, we had a large group of people who were involved, had scrum calls every night and there was an exhilaration in being part of something new and exciting. Now, we have one scrum call a week and Anne and I are often alone. Although this change is partially associated with the desire to move everything to the esme.dev mailing list, it is still an indication of a change in project dynamics. I know that everyone has been busy but if we continue at this rate, we must change the expectations that currently exist in Pearl, Siemens SIS, etc - and perhaps, the personal expectations of those involved in the project. We currently have nothing to show potential users or interested parties. The problem is that our present community is too small and with one just one developer committing code, our progress is too slow to meet the current expectations that exist externally. If we look at our "competition" in microbloging (Yammer and laconi.ca), they are progressing rapidly. Indeed, SAPLabs has also already installed a version of laconi.ca for internal usage. Anne and I are sort of like business users who are looking to IT to complete a project without any ability to really influence its progress. We can't code but are dependent on the developers to produce. Despite the fact Pearl has expressed an interest in investing in ESME, the project is still an open-source project that lives from the contributions of its community. Pearl might be able to finance some development but Pearl won't be able to finance all development efforts. For Anne and I, ESME is still an "Experiment" - although we have both invested much love in the project, we have come to realize that without additional development progress, the project will stagnate and die. ESME's death would break the hearts of many but all of us would survive. If if ESME's death is imminent, I'd like to look reality in the eye rather than ignore the trends that are so obvious. So, the big question is: how do we increase community involvement? An open-source projects lives from small changes from many developers. With our tiny to non-existent community, how should we progress in these small steps? I don't know if the problem is associated with disterest in microblogging, limited number of developers who know Scala or another reason. Maybe, the evolution that we are experiencing is present in all Incubator projects? @Mentors - any suggestions? Anne and Dick
