It's been a strange past month for me, flying around the country, listening to people talk about blogging, internet, and other computer issues. During all of the conferences I've attended and conversations with people, I've been thinking about Habari and our road forward.
A few folks have read recent posts on my about the survival of open source projects. I think one of the essential ideas behind communities that makes them long-lasting is a strong bond between the people that make up the community. As such, one of the most important things I think we can do within the next year has nothing to do with coding. I'd really like to start the discussion now about some kind of gathering of Habari developers and enthusiasts. Call it "Habaricon". I know that people will have different opinions about how it should work, what we should do, and (most emphatically) where it should be. The only thing I ask is that when you're done suggesting your own home town for the location, you do two things: Consider where the best location will be to get the most people together at once, and think about what you can do on your own to grow a local sub-community of Habari enthusiasts. Another idea that I really liked from my recent trip to OhioLinux is one I learned from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager. He spoke about how there were many small communities inside of Ubuntu, and that "belonging" to any of the small communities or the larger Ubuntu community is a significant part of what makes working with Ubuntu appealing. I think we could do something similar, and even suggested to skippy that perhaps our next bug hunt could pit different regional Habari groups against each other for total bug crushing domination. I spend a good deal of time writing these long posts, so I'll just keep this last idea reasonably short and implementation-free. With 0.6 approaching delivery - which might come as a surprise, but it's getting rather close to being done - I've been saying for a while that 0.7's focus should really be about theming. There are other points on which we could focus, and I fully expect that people will step into the leadership roles required to accomplish them (this is the topic of a long post yet to come), but now seems like a good time to implement themes, since people - especially themers - are starting to take more notice of our system. There are a lot of good ideas floating around on how to make a superior theme system to other tools that are available, but I don't think we're done coming up with them. We need to organize these thoughts so that we can implement something cohesive and streamlined when we begin to ramp up 0.7 development. A few issues to consider: * How do we best educate a WordPress themer (essentially the people we're trying to woo) to produce a Habari theme? * How can we make the theme system more easily handle common theming tasks? * Is there a way to provide both WordPress and Drupal-style theme systems? * How can we simplify the configuration of themes and provide a user interface that common users can use to drive more complicated theme configurations? * How can we do all of this and keep the system flexible? Obviously, I have a few answers for my own questions, but I'd love to hear other people's ideas. This area is where I intend to spend a good bit of my time when 0.6 is out the door, and I hope others will join me. A final thought: One of the more significant take-aways from Jono's presentation was that in a community like ours, we need to spend our time turning sentiments of "This sucks. And you suck, too." into "I'm gonna kick some ass." and actually accomplishing something. I think there's still great cause to be excited about Habari, especially as we close in on our 1.0 release. There's still significant ground to cover, but as long as people are willing to kick ass and contribute in any way they can, we can produce the kick ass product we know Habari can be. Thanks to everybody for being part of this. I'm anxious to hear what you think of any of the ideas above, or even any new ideas of your own. Owen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
