Owen, this is exactly the kind of feedback I needed. I do have more questions for you, but I need to thoroughly parse this first. Thank you *so* much!
Cheers, E. On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Owen Winkler <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/9/2011 3:09 PM, Elizabeth Naramore wrote: > >> After some discussion in IRC today, it was deemed that I should send >> this to the list. As you guys know, I'm the Community Development >> Manager for SourceForge, and one of my goals is to help us help projects >> like yours. You guys are awesome, and many of you know me personally, so >> I hope that you will not be afraid to give me honest feedback. In fact, >> I'm counting on that. So don't worry about anything, just be honest. >> That's the only way we can get better, and the only way we can help open >> source. >> >> 1. What are 3 things keeping you from hosting your downloads through us? >> > > In random order: > > a. Wasn't sure how to get started. (After poking for a few minutes, it > seems it's pretty simple to start, but then things get confusing > immediately. What's "Beta Forge"? Should I choose that to start? If I use > up my project name, on the wrong choice, is it gone forever? Etc.) > > b. Perceived "old tech" associated with SourceForge compared to the "new > hotness" of GitHub, Google Code. The idea that most of the projects there > are dodgy, ill-maintained/abandoned, UX-deprived, half-baked programs that > won't even run on my modern architecture, and don't want that perception > associated with Habari. > > c. Questions about ownership/control of code, project, and resources as > they might be related to the project structure/organization. For example, > licensing in the Google Code repo (which is where Habari was before we went > out on our own) couldn't be multi-license, the -extras repo (the public repo > for ASL-compatible community plugins) would have been too difficult to > maintain, granular permissions to branches in the SVN repo were impossible, > integration between our services becomes more complex when they're spread > across different services (JibbyBot, wiki lookups, manual, docs, schema > definitions, etc.), and there was no possibility to style the whole system > uniformly across resources to prevent people visiting the download (or any > resource) page from asking "Is this Habari or something else?". > > > 2. If you could change 3 things about SourceForge, what would they be? >> > > a. The perception that mostly dodgy software (see above) is housed there. > > b. Better promotion of features. I can't see what SF does without creating > a project. > > c. Provide direct, visible links for software downloads to use via wget. > > d. Offer Habari as a default hosted app. ;) > > > 3. What are the 3 most important factors for the success of your project? >> > > I'm sure I don't gauge our success in the same way as most people or other > projects. But. > > a. Making sure that we convert users into contributors and/or advocates. > > b. Providing tools that let people easily contribute in the ways they are > able. > > c. To get people in the web development world not to think of Habari as > "like WordPress" but a useful tool in its own right, whether due to its > architecture or some features that it offers that are different. > > > 4. What is an obstacle you've had to overcome with your project, or >> something that you're currently struggling with? >> > > Infrastructure maintenance and cost. > > Coordinating releases is a pain in the butt. (Ah, the beauty of GitHub's > code review features.) > > Integrating translations. This seems like a missing feature on SF? We use > Launchpad, which is still not under our infrastructure umbrella. > > > These answers will probably spawn more questions. Feel free to ask > directly, if you want. Hope this has been helpful. > > 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 -- 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
