As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I'm shifting my focus more to the extended OpenOffice ecosystem rather than day-to-day release-cycle tasks. One of the things I'd like to push for is reinvigorating the application development community.
In the legacy project we supported extensions authors via a dedicated mailing list, a wiki, its own IRC channel, and of course the extensions repository website. Today we have very little of that active. I'd like to breath some new life into this part of the ecosystem. Now that we have a steady heartbeat of releases, both delivered and planned, and a solid record of end-user downloads, it is easier to argue the value of developing extensions for OpenOffice. I'd like to help promote this side of the ecosystem via the following tasks: 1) Create a new mailing list: ooo-extensi...@incubator.apache.org (or app...@incubator.apache.org if we prefer). I'll assert that the current mailing lists are inadequate for encouraging this community to thrive. If they interact on ooo-dev then they are bombarded with 99% irrelevant posts, and if they gather on ooo-users then this will be disruptive to the end-user subscribers there. Extension authors really are a distinct sub-community of their own. 2) Promote the mailing list via the usual means: website, social networking, maybe a blog post. 3) Try to contact the existing extension authors, to encourage them to joint the list. I'd try to do this via SourceForge initially, since they might already have the means to send them all an email. 4) Promote AOO extension development in general, by interviews of extension authors, blog posts, perhaps even a rotating spot on our website featuring an "extension of the week" (or day). 5) Encourage this community to provide feedback to the project and help maintain the current app dev and SDK documentation, website and wiki. If there are no objections to the above I'll go ahead with step 1 in 72 hours. I'll need a couple more list moderator volunteers as well. And of course, if anyone wants to help with other parts of the above, or complimentary tasks, please let me know. Regards, -Rob
