On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 08:43 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: > I've seen several posts asking about how the core OOo development project > will relate to the other activities such as user forums, translations, > releases, language projects, etc. I thought it would be good to have a > single thread to discuss the general issues. > > As many of us know, with OpenOffice.org under Sun/Oracle, there was a > widespread community of semi-autonomous projects, under the > openoffice.org"umbrella". One way to divide this is by the > "development" functions, by > which I mean the things that lead directly to the artifacts that were part > of the official OOo releases: > > - programmers, including localization and accessibility > - testers > - product documentation > - UI design > - content designers for templates, samples, etc. > - build/release management > > I think that it will be ideal to get all volunteers working in this set of > functions into the same Apache OpenOffice.org project, under the same > license, and working together. > > > And then there are other functions that helped promote and support the > releases and the users who adopted the releases: > > - marketing > - support forums > - event organizers > - and many other similar functions
Just a small comment here: the "product documentation" in your first list is, I assume, the Help shipped with the product. There is another set of documentation, the user docs, which mostly produced by the community. These include user guides -- available in ODT, PDF, wiki (OOo 3.2 and earlier), and printed form -- and the documentation wiki (containing, among other things howtos, tutorials, faqs, etc). IMO these user guides and wiki items are in the "user support" area, along with support forums -- a subset of your "many other similar functions". The user guides are produced by an autonomous group formerly known as "OOoAuthors" (now called "ODFAuthors"), which uses its own website (on a server provided by TDF) for tracking production of the documents. Those documents are then made available for download through the OOo wiki. I think we therefore fall into the category that you describe below, with all the potential tradeoffs that you have mentioned. So I am very glad that you started this thread. I shall have more to say later. --Jean > I think these groups are welcome to join the Apache project, but they would > need to consider the trade-offs. If they have autonomy now, run their own > servers, elect or appoint their own leaders, etc., then moving to Apache > means merging their structures into the Apache project, mapping their roles > into contributor/committer/PMC member roles, adopting their web sites to the > Apache infrastructure, working openly on the Apache mailing lists, allowing > anyone to work on it, as well as allowing anyone to review and comment on > their work. In other words, they give up some control and in return have a > potentially larger group of people to help them.
