-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sat December 20 2003 12:36, Philip Rodrigues wrote: > On the other hand, there are a few issues with the proposal that need > clarification, or discussion: > > 1. Are there enough people who have the necessary skills to perform tasks > like this? You suggest programming, bug management, documentation, UI, > artwork and communication as tasks which would be overseen by the Janitors. > This is a very wide range of skills :-) > > 2. Would the aims of coordination between different teams be more easily > achieved by formalising (slightly) the role of application maintainer? Or, > to put the point in a slightly different way, would the Janitors just end > up being the current application maintainers, since they already know the > application? If this happens, (as seems likely?), then it will go against > the idea of involving new people.
I think the most important skill a Janitor must have is communications skills. You can know a lot about an application without needing to know how to write code, you can do a lot of bug management without needing to know how to debug the actual problem, you can make useful suggestions for icons without actually being able to draw. KDE is a very large project, as a developer it is impossible to be subscribed and follow all mailinglists. A janitor can play an important role here by shielding developers, bug fixers and artists from a lot of the noise on many of the mailinglists and feeding these people the useful bits of information. Take for example a mailinglist such as kde at kde.org. A lot of questions about a specific application could be easily answered by the janitor for that application. When it becomes clear that an application has a bug or an important missing feature, the janitor can then file a bugreport on bugs.kde.org and raise its priority. The developer could pay extra extension to such bugreports because (s)he knows that it is a real issue and that the janitor has already made sure that all relevant information is available. Ideally, a Janitor would be in an excellent position to write documentation for the application or, lacking writing skills, assist a documentation writer. A Janitor would also be in a great position to maintain a FAQ. The focus on a single application is crucial here, because maintaining a FAQ for all of KDE does not seem to work very well, probably because it is just too much work. By limiting the focus on a single application, chances of success become much greater. A critical success factor for this all is the ability of the Janitor to work together with the maintainer/developers of the application, as already mentioned in the paper by Carlos, the Janitor must be able to make the work of the developers/doc-writers/debuggers/artists more pleasant, otherwise it will not work. Another critical success factor might be the name ;-) People might not be lining up to become "Janitor" :-) I think the suggestion to start with a pilot is very good. We can talk about this stuff for ages but without any real experiences most of it will just be speculation. Cheers, Waldo - -- bastian at kde.org -=|[ KDE: K Desktop for the Enterprise ]|=- bastian at suse.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE/5FDjN4pvrENfboIRAjc2AKCotOY9FlmqhG8gDPogmfAfwfKh5gCfbgZI soPtoRARDRIqCR15nW4sljg= =K3oT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
