From: "[email protected]"<[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Mon, June 13, 2011 3:07:04 PM
Subject: Proposed short term goals
At a very high level view, I think we want to set a handful of short term
goals, generally around transitioning the project from the Oracle
infrastructure to Apache infrastructure.
We have other goals, as well, which are defined for us by Apache,
necessary to graduate from a Podling:
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/openofficeorg.html
But we need to do the basic transition. It is moving day for OpenOffice!
We need to pack everything from OpenOffice.org that we want to keep and
bring it over to Apache.
Although we are not obligated to do things exactly how they were done
before in OpenOffice.org, it seems that the nature of the project is that
we'll have some clearly distinguished functional subgroups within the
project, including:
1) Development, including release management
2) Translation/Localization
3) Documentation, both in-product and on-website
4) User support, including user forums
5) Marketing
(Are there any others? I may be missing something.)
I think it would be great if the Committers sort themselves up for one or
more of these functions and help drive the project to some short-term
goals. Maybe each function has its own email list? (dev, translation,
doc, support, marketing) Plus a "general" list for cross-cutting
discussions?
===> Could we get a wiki for the Podling, as well as the above
per-function mailing lists, so we can work on planning? I think tossing
90 of us on a single dev list is non-optimal.
For example, the Development team should probably focus on get the code
to build on Windows, Linux and Mac. As was noted in the proposal
discussion, we believe that Oracle's original SGA will need to be
supplemented by additional contributions in order to get to a successful
build. We should note other things that appear missing, like CWS,
plugins, etc., as well. But let's concentrate on the critical goal of
getting to a successful build of the contributed code on the three major
platforms.
Translation team might concentrate on working with Apache Infrastructure
team to get a Pootle server set up on and ensure that Oracle has
contributed all translation files.
Ditto for documentation and support. We need to find out what needs to be
packed up, and find a place for it on the new Apache infrastructure. This
includes product-resources, i.e., things that get included in the released
install image, but also user-facing web content and project-facing web
content.
Marketing probably wants to work on the trademark and logo related issues.
In order to remain coordinated, I'd also suggest that each team sketch out
a plan, maybe on a wiki, for what substeps are needed to achieve these
initial goals.
Does this make sense? We need to get to a point where Oracle can hand
over the DNS entries for OpenOffice.org to Apache shut off their servers,
and have continuity of all important project and user systems running on
the Apache infrastructure. And by continuity, the ideal situation would
be continuity at the level of a link as well, e.g., an external link to an
OpenOffice.org web site would remain useful after the transition, although
it might be redirected.
-Rob
