Hi devs, First, I want to apologise, as many of you will get two copiess of this email and some will even see it three, this one time. I, however, wanted to make sure everybody has all the relevant addresses.
Second, indeed I think we should move this discussion to the list, rather than sending emails with bunch of CCs. I would like to remind everybody, that there is a mailing list: [email protected], which is supposed to be used for more or less general discussions related to our project and especially for stuff like that. Donnie: nice reminder of the sci alias, but I think the list is suited better for this purpose. First, it is free for all to sign up, so we need not take special care of interested/involved nondevs. More importantly, this way the discussion will not interfer with bug reports (and the other way around). Wednesday, 13. May 2009, Andrey Kislyuk Ви написали: > - Current projects. All active developers, please reply to this > message with a list of any major items you're working on, so we can > put them in the status report. For instance, I'm working on the > bioperl-1.6.0 update and a few big troublesome sci-biology packages > including ncbi-tools++, gbench, wgs-assembler and cytoscape. I know > Markus is working on the Octave 3 stuff. What else? Thanks for the reports sent so far. However I would like to expand this request a bit - it would really be nice to get a headcount. Therefore, I would like to ask all devs who are still involved in Scientific Gentoo to respond, shortly outlining the (intended) range of "responsibilities" and expected activity level, - even if not very active at the moment. Please answer to the list, so that we can keep track of the responces in one concise thread. Actually, I'll branch the discussion then and will create a subthread for this in a moment.. After collecting the responce we can update the webpage - I could do it or somebody else willing could step up ;). I'll start with myself: > - Selecting a lead. George Shapovalov is our current lead. George, if > you're active, we'll need your help with the status update, otherwise > we need to select a new lead. Please reply to nominate people or with > any thoughts (we could be anarchists like the python herd and go > without a lead!) Well, I am here, although I am not working on any specific package(s), mostly reacting to organizational issues. I was indeed rather quiet last few month, however we have seen a steady flow of new contributors to science overlay - I had to do mediate one almost montly for the last year or so. Which implies, that we should have a good pool of potential devs, however, as always, this is not guaranteed - people need to stay active, not just show activity once. As for my lead status - either is fine with me. I try to react and organize when something comes up, however, I am afraid, I will not have much time in the coming year or two for more active actions (have to push out a couple of papers and change position). In this regard, you could call what was going on an anarchy - people going about their regular routines and taking care of their areas of interest and organizing when necessary, but I would rather call it "pragmatic handling" ;). If there are some ideas about some projects it would be interesting to discuss them, however, as I mentioned, it has been quiet lately in this regard. I'd say, the real need that we may have is organizing another wave of recruitment. Thus I definitly wellcome the request for recruitment status: > - Recruiting and recruit status. If you're being recruited or are in > charge of a recruit, please reply so we have a head count and let us > know the ETA for becoming a dev if you have one. but again, would like to expand it slightly. As the original message will only reach the people on the original CC list, I'd like to ask anybody who knows a prospective applicant/interested user to forward this rectuitment request correspondingly. Please ask them to subscribe to gentoo-science mailing list as well. Some of the old participants might even still be on the list in fact :). > We need to add a > staffing needs section to the project page. Do we have specific > recruiting requests? On the updating the recruitment page. IIRC we were discussing (somewhat transient discussion I must admit) this some half a year ago (with bicataly and somebody else on irc?). The general feeling was that our staffing needs are a bit different from the general Gentoo populace, as people who make a good fit would be proficient in (or at least familiar with) some or other scientific discipline. Also, such people usually have a crapload of other duties on their hands and/or are somewhat shy in terms of active participation in geek discussions/communities. Therefore we considered the overlay as the most promising recruitment avenue and I think we could try to check if any of its regualrs are ripe enough for joining with a full dev status. Nonetheless, putting the request in the open should not hart. I would, however, urge whoever is going to write recruitment request to be careful about wording. Weer there any specific plans - who and when was going to do this or should I write something up? (perhaps in ~2 weeks, after headcount somewhat settles; nug me if I slip off the radar again - I am almost always there, just silent). > We also need a tracker bug for science > contributors who are potential recruits. There is one such, still open, but did not see much activity for over a year. Perhaps we cpuld create a new one with less text :), although that one is not that long. But it should be better organized - we need a separate bugs branching off - one per recruitment case. In fact, we just need the recruits, as was discussed above, and this is the main problem I'd say. Then we can simply add standard recruitment bugs as dependencies. What may need to go in the bug itself are some org discussions - summaries of which could be attached to keep track of things. Oh, the bug; its #138021: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138021 George
