Tom Hobbs wrote: ...
As for engaging users, I think that has to be a must. The user list is not hugely active; I kind of get the feeling that people accepted the Jini 2.1 code and have pretty much ignored River since. At least, that's my experience of "Jini vs River". We need to publicize River and get people downloading and using it. I've seen commit and download charts on other open source projects. Does anyone know how we can get those - or if they think it's a good idea?
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We may have an opportunity in conjunction with graduation. When that happens we should try to get out a press release, and distribute it every way we know how, with the following messages:
1. Apache River has an active development team and is now a full fledged Apache project.
2. The development team welcomes input from both active users of River, and from users and potential users of Jini who are not yet River users. Here are some ways to supply input to the team: (mailing list, issue tracker...). You do not have to become a contributor to the source code to influence it - just make a good case that a change would improve River.
I know the wording here is very rough - I'm definitely not a marketing person - but I think if we make enough of a splash with these messages it should help both spread use of River and get us that input we are looking for.
Patricia
