Hi all, I've been thinking about how to improve our community experience and attract new users and contributors for some time and I am quite sure we should, at least, try to do the following :
1. make our getting started guides much much more easy for someone who doesn't have any clue about what, for instance, Hadoop is and how to configure it; defining a more tiny and clear list of small steps in order to start Hama, the web interface, etc. I don't know if that's a common opinion but it seems to me the 'quick start' page contains all the needed stuff to know to start Hama but for a new user it may be not so easy to manage all that information. 2. allow more users to contribute creating small and self contained issues. This was the way I started here at ASF: I didn't have a deep understanding of each of the components of the first project I was involved with (Apache UIMA) but I found some small and trivial issues (a couple of lines of code to document / fix / create) I could start from and that allowed me to get more familiar with the code and the insights of the project AND at the same time this allowed the project committers to care more about bigger and more complex issues. The big design decisions and improvements will be still handled by committers most of the times but simpler things can be improved and taken from newcomers. One other thing could be improve how we present to the "public" with our website but it may be tricky, however there I suggest adding some screenshots/pictures for the architecture / BSP model. One last thing regards a technical point: it may be good if we could define a Maven profile to automatically start a Hama cluster from Maven but we should decide if / how to do that; this would allow the user to do a SVN checkout, run the Maven goal and understanding by seeing Hama working. Just as an example for the web interface to be started from Maven, we could use the Maven Jetty plugin [1]. I hope this helps but I look forward to ear other people opinions and points. Have a nice day. Tommaso [1] : http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Maven+Jetty+Plugin
