Hi All, *The need for discussion on project work systems and effort distribution * I'm striking up this thread for us to discuss how we as community can work more efficiently and with better balance of work between members of the community. The aim has to be develop better software, better online resources and a more sustainable balance of work between members of the community. There isn't one single thing that needs improving, and there won't be on single golden bullet, and there won't be one personal that solve the various issues that are holding us back from doing even better. I also don't expect this thread to solve the various issues, we've had even had similar threads in past which has led to a few changes, mostly for the better, some with little impact in the end. However, I'd hope this thread will be a start to re-invigorating the effort to fixing the various things we could do better.
In this first post I'll outline what I see as issues that we need to start thinking about how to deal with better, I will leave suggestions of how to improve things for follow up emails. *My situation : just keeping up, but only by dedicating almost 100% of time to unpaid project work, which is not sustainable* The impetuous for me to strike up this thread now is down to realization that despite concentrating almost entirely on unpaid project work since the end of November, I'm still struggling to clear the submissions backlog and to complete all my planned work items for the up coming OpenSceneGraph-3.0 stable release. Business wise the last two years have been my best since I begun back in 2001, and having hit my financial targets for my financial year April 2009 to April 2010, I decided to finally have a rest of frantic work for clients, and concentrate on all the unpaid tasks that I hadn't been able to tackle over the past year, as well as recharge my batteries. Fast forward almost three months and yes, I have been recharging my batteries, I'm still having to work pretty hard to make any progress on those tasks I'd been planning - instead I've largely been a slave to just catching up with submissions and other community tasks. Right now I am clearing the submissions backlog but slower than I'd like, and tackling some of the tasks I had planned, it's taking me near 100% of my time, which is fine for now, but there will come a time soon when I will need to back to earning a living once more, and will have to drop my unpaid efforts back down to less than 50% of my time. Not difficult to see crunch time is potentially looming. Clearly as a community we need to start planning for when I scale back my unpaid work, and be able to smoothly take up the slack when it happens. *Wider project issues : websites, servers, version control, packaging, support, public meetings, promotion etc. * OK, there is lots of issues in this topic heading. Often I see posts from members of the community that site write access to subversion as a major bottleneck for the project, however, as I project lead this isn't what concerns me the most. It's the wider project issues - it's how to better manage all the parts that go into making this project vibrant and good for both end users and those who contribute to it in all the various ways. Everything is connected, as a community we have to deal with all the various aspects of keeping the project ticking over, but all too often I think this connectedness is lost sight of, and we see single topic solutions proposed as a silver bullet, we need to address everything together to make a real difference. To illustrate what I mean about how different task impact on each other, from a personal level, I have to manage my time between professional support, public support, merging submissions, developing code. The public support part is partly visible on the mailing list but it also comes down to answering all the emails queries about the server, mailing lists, or various other project services that don't work at some point, or some issue with wiki permissions, well the list goes on. All these different tasks take a bit of my time and it steadily mounts up, but crucially it also overloads my brain with too many different tasks that are all spinning at one time. Heavy multi-tasking like this seriously undermines anyones productivity, I'm no different - it's a double whammy - I have lots of different demands on my time and I'm less efficient in the process. Put the two together and the only way to balance the books is to work more and more hours, and even this doesn't come free, burnout looms, both physical and mental. Remember that bout of RSI I had in both wrists a couple of years back from working too many 60 hours weeks on the trot? Clearly getting a better balance of work tasks is crucial to the OpenSceneGraph project getting the most out of my time. I'm not the only person with challenges in working life, both in the OpenSceneGraph community context and outside. Lets face it, practically all of use have too many things to do and too little time to do it in. Life is also in constant flux, people go to university, people get jobs, people start families, people move jobs, people even occasionally take up hobbies and other interests outside computing - hard as that might be to believe ;-) *Solutions : people and systems* OK, I did say that I wasn't going to approach the topic of solutions in this mail, and I'm not, but I'd like to add a little framework onto the discussion in terms of the types of changes we can bring to bear to improve the project efficient and balance. I'm expecting that solutions will fall under the broad categories of "people" (i.e. who does what when) and "systems" (webserver systems, version control, cdash etc. etc.), again the two are connected as the systems are set up, maintained and used by people. So there's the first post, over to you community ;-) Robert.
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