Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
(I just rediscovered this thread as part of a year-end mail cleanup...) On Nov 14, 2007 4:32 PM, James Margaris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am one of the pimary committers on XAP. As far as the board report, I just plain missed it until it was too late. As far as the community building is concerned, yes the lists are basically dead. However work does continue on the project, for better or worse. This is the part that both baffles me and concerns me. How is it that a group of developers can continue to work on a project without any discussion on what they're working on? The only way I could see that happening is if the project is effectively done and people are just fixing the odd bug that gets submitted, but my impression, at least, is that XAP is not a project that is close to being done. Perhaps I'm wrong about this. So where is the discussion on what happens next? The roadmap, on the web site, stops at a year ago, and XAP 0.3.0 was released early in 2007. Is there a plan to get from 0.3.0 to, say, a 1.0 release? Where can I read about that? One question that I would ask the XAP folks who work for Nexaweb (which is a majority of them, I believe): Is there any discussion at all within Nexaweb about XAP, its status, its future, and its development? Frankly, this has always seemed to me the most likely reason for the lack of discussion on the lists - the discussions are happening, but happening in person between people who work for the same company. Part of the reason I stopped using the lists is that substantive responses were rare. The only thing I ever got comments on were things like naming and copyright notices. Of course that is a chicken and egg problem to some degree, there is no community so nobody uses the lists to discuss so there is no community. It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? I like discussing technical issues with people but I don't like posting technical thoughts only to be met consistently by silence. At that point it becomes busywork, just going through the motions for the sake of appearances. Let's flip that around. If you were looking at a project with a view to getting involved in it, how likely would you be to post your thoughts and ideas if not even the people already involved are discussing anything in the open? I understand that it can be hard to bootstrap the discussion. But without a track record of discussion on the lists, there's little reason for anyone not already involved to even subscribe to those lists. People need to see that *something* is happening on the project. The threads don't all need to be deep technical discussions. For example, where's the thread on what should go into the 0.4.0 release? How should the 1.0 release be defined? Is everything - architecture, design, dev process, testing, documentation - so well nailed down for this project that the people involved don't need to talk about it? I've been involved with Struts, for example, for 7 years, and we *still* have discussions about all of those! -- Martin Cooper The XAP project is not like projects like Kabuki that never did any development and never responded on the lists. There is active development and if someone ever posted to the lists I'm sure someone would respond. Right now posting on the lists feels like playing to an empty theater. James Margaris From: Robert Burrell Donkin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 11/14/2007 2:42 PM To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help (forgive the rambling reply) On Nov 12, 2007 4:47 PM, Noel J. Bergman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits XAP is an interesting case. in some ways, i think that XAP has always been short of just one independent developer showing up to scratch an itch. there was no end of endeavour in the early days from the team to try to fit in. the atmosphere has always been open, polite and encouraging to outsiders but the volumes of people turning up on list have just too far too low. i've tried to figure out some rational explanation for this but i don't have one. at apachecon EU, rob gave a very well attended session on XAP and many people had questions. but no one really showed up on list to follow up afterwards. not sure why. martin tried hard for quite a while to encourage the team to talk a lot more on the list without long term success. it's tough, though. i find it hard to explain why talking is vital for community building. most of the time, no one is listening but sometimes, just sometimes a few words flung out into the ether will connect with someone. one connection with someone who goes onto become a long
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
On Tuesday 01 January 2008 06:20, Martin Cooper wrote: Frankly, this has always seemed to me the most likely reason for the lack of discussion on the lists - the discussions are happening, but happening in person between people who work for the same company. This is indeed a big mental barrier to overcome for companies in general. Moving from F2F discussions to open development is hard, and I must admit that even veterans like myself fall back to F2F occasionally. However, I don't think that's the case here. Sounds more like a couple of (one?) developers continue progressing their corner of the codebase. James, building community is hard, but XAP sits right on the money both in terms of technology hype/interest as well as many eyes on ASF, so I think it should be a lot easier than many other podlings. Mailing list activity is the number one gauge for external folks to make a risk assessment of will this project survive/thrive... My suggestions; 1) Start announcing development to be made. Both quite ahead of time in abstract form, as well as nitty, gritty details as you work with it. 2) Announce after-the-fact, what has been done in commits. Most people don't care reading commit logs, so sumarize rNN:MM this and that has been added/modified/deleted/changed... bla bla bla. 3) There seems to be a fair bit of JIRA issues filed in the project. Try comment on those issues on the dev mailing list. Try to create a discussion of possible solutions, in parallel to the comments on the issue. 4) There are 17 open NewFeature/Improvements in Jira right. These should serve as excellent starting points to discuss between the main developer, other developers and the reporter, what can/should be done. Personally, I don't think web site and documentation is the critical parts in this particular case to bootstrap community. There are always hard-core people who can take what you have and put it in use. That said, for mass adoption, you probably need to improve docs in various areas. You will always hear complaints on docs from users, either too much, too little, wrong level of granularity, no overview, no details, can't find X, and so on... That is normal. Cheers -- Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer I live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er I work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Communication docs [WAS Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help]
On Nov 15, 2007 5:00 PM, Luciano Resende [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My 0.02$ as well... Gilles's suggestion is a good one to try. In addition to that, I took a quick look at the XAP mailing list, and I guess that, Instead of creating tons of JIRAS, the committers could start sending a short e-mail describing the problem, or describing a new feature ? As a user, a descriptive e-mail would probably catch my attention much easier then a JIRA, and after you have the user attention, it's much easier to have the user engage on the discussion. Also, advertise, advertise, advertise... with blog, articles, posts on sites like serverside, infoQ, etc +1 IIRC the incubator doesn't have any documentation addressing the communication side of community building. i've been reluctant to tackle this in the past (since it's even more subjective than the rest) but i wonder whether some podlings don't understand rules aimed at helping them build a strong and open community. i've created a JIRA (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INCUBATOR-70) so that people can add tips or longer prose. please feel free to jump in and add comments. once there's a critical mass then we can try to pull together some prose so don't worry about the style - just get down ideas. - robert - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
On Nov 15, 2007 12:32 AM, James Margaris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am one of the pimary committers on XAP. As far as the board report, I just plain missed it until it was too late. hi james As far as the community building is concerned, yes the lists are basically dead. However work does continue on the project, for better or worse. Part of the reason I stopped using the lists is that substantive responses were rare. The only thing I ever got comments on were things like naming and copyright notices. most podlings struggling on the stuff like that (so that's why i posted on those topics) but i probably should have focussed more on community building... Of course that is a chicken and egg problem to some degree, there is no community so nobody uses the lists to discuss so there is no community. the list is very good for users: polite, prompt replies by experts are typical. until someone who's interested in development shows up, this limits the scope for discussion. It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? i admit that i've been a little bit perplexed - everything i've seen is good (maybe even too good) but the key audience is not the apache community (typically, developers have more interests than energy to pursue them) but new independent developers from outside apache. it's this mix which makes [EMAIL PROTECTED] cool - it's great to work on a project with people scattered across the globe united by shared enthusiam for a technology. if you have a little time, review the tika archives: jukka and bertrand are members and understand community building but tika really didn't start kicking off until an independent developer showed up. I like discussing technical issues with people but I don't like posting technical thoughts only to be met consistently by silence. At that point it becomes busywork, just going through the motions for the sake of appearances. if it's just going through the motions then it will be useless but open source projects @ apache only succeed when there are people who not only love to write cool software but also people who love to share cool software with others. the open source space is now very crowded: it's hard to get heard. talking about a project is a good way to get other people enthused. should be easy enough - XAP has some interesting and unusual features and AJAX is hot. blogs can be a useful side channel. www.planetapache.org is widely read and open to all apache committers. if you don't have a blog, jroller (for example) is read by a lot of java people. The XAP project is not like projects like Kabuki that never did any development and never responded on the lists. There is active development and if someone ever posted to the lists I'm sure someone would respond. +1 Right now posting on the lists feels like playing to an empty theater. i can appreciate why you say this. i prefer to think of it as conductive a monologue ;-) apache is highly ranked and the mailing lists well archived and indexed. each post is recorded and nothing wasted. words build a community. engineer the process for serendipity. - robert - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
On Nov 16, 2007 11:31 PM, Robert Burrell Donkin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Nov 15, 2007 12:32 AM, James Margaris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip Right now posting on the lists feels like playing to an empty theater. i can appreciate why you say this. i prefer to think of it as conductive a monologue ;-) apache is highly ranked and the mailing lists well archived and indexed. each post is recorded and nothing wasted. words build a community. engineer the process for serendipity. maybe an example would be illuminating i've been trying to build up a new community around JAMES IMAP for most of this year. i blogged more about IMAP and email (it's natural since i've been spending more time on this and have more comments). i've also started to email more speculative posts to the mailing list (search for my name and IMAP at http://james.markmail.org/). for many, many months this was principally a monologue but i persevered. over the last month or two, i've started to find newcomers replying. i have high hopes that over the next six months, a healthy community will have bootstrapped. there are a couple of reasons why i think we look at list traffic: one negative and one positive apache needs to to ensure active projects do active development from closing up to outsiders (i don't think that this is true for XAP) the other is that many people here have observed that good use of the mailing lists is crucial for community building. IMHO XAP has a healthy list atmosphere but increasing the number of good posts would increase the likelihood of independent developers showing up on list. - robert - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
2007/11/15, James Margaris [EMAIL PROTECTED]: It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? Did you have enought users? I know, it is a chicken eggs problem. But you can maybe try to initiate the loop by devellopping some features/plugin/extension for an existing product that has a wide community. Propose patches using XAP to a popular project. If the community of this project like it (and if it was the right community) they will start to use it in their project and in other project. My 0.02$ -- Gilles SCOKART
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
My 0.02$ as well... Gilles's suggestion is a good one to try. In addition to that, I took a quick look at the XAP mailing list, and I guess that, Instead of creating tons of JIRAS, the committers could start sending a short e-mail describing the problem, or describing a new feature ? As a user, a descriptive e-mail would probably catch my attention much easier then a JIRA, and after you have the user attention, it's much easier to have the user engage on the discussion. Also, advertise, advertise, advertise... with blog, articles, posts on sites like serverside, infoQ, etc It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? Well, from a quick look, website, samples, etc looks good and interesting. On Nov 15, 2007 2:31 AM, Gilles Scokart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2007/11/15, James Margaris [EMAIL PROTECTED]: It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? Did you have enought users? I know, it is a chicken eggs problem. But you can maybe try to initiate the loop by devellopping some features/plugin/extension for an existing product that has a wide community. Propose patches using XAP to a popular project. If the community of this project like it (and if it was the right community) they will start to use it in their project and in other project. My 0.02$ -- Gilles SCOKART -- Luciano Resende Apache Tuscany Committer http://people.apache.org/~lresende http://lresende.blogspot.com/ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
Carsten Ziegeler wrote: Noel J. Bergman wrote: It appears that we have a number of projects to discuss: NMaven - mailing list shows steady activity. XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits WSRP4J - burst of activity during the Summer, nothing since. The issues do not appear to be the same in all cases. I had to review the archives, since there were no board reports. I still think we should close WSRP4J and afaik it's an open issue at the portals project. Talking briefly with Ate about wsrp4j, the main/real problem is the still pending license issue which prevents getting wsrp4j getting out of the incubator for years now. So seeing wsrp4j in this light, I think it makes sense to first try to resolve this issue and perhaps, once this is resolved it reveals that wsrp4j is an interesting project and we don't have to close it. So this is something the portals pmc has to deal with. Carsten -- Carsten Ziegeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
(forgive the rambling reply) On Nov 12, 2007 4:47 PM, Noel J. Bergman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits XAP is an interesting case. in some ways, i think that XAP has always been short of just one independent developer showing up to scratch an itch. there was no end of endeavour in the early days from the team to try to fit in. the atmosphere has always been open, polite and encouraging to outsiders but the volumes of people turning up on list have just too far too low. i've tried to figure out some rational explanation for this but i don't have one. at apachecon EU, rob gave a very well attended session on XAP and many people had questions. but no one really showed up on list to follow up afterwards. not sure why. martin tried hard for quite a while to encourage the team to talk a lot more on the list without long term success. it's tough, though. i find it hard to explain why talking is vital for community building. most of the time, no one is listening but sometimes, just sometimes a few words flung out into the ether will connect with someone. one connection with someone who goes onto become a long term contributor then pays back the time spent on the rest. but if there really isn't anyone listening then the effort is really wasted. in many ways, the fault is mine. i probably should have found more time to actively promote community building and envanlegise (but JAMES took a lot more energy than i'd expected). i'm not an expert in this area but the design ideas seemed to me powerful and unusual enough to be worth allowing development to continue whilst there were developers willing to code. however, this unusual miss may be that this is a sign that the people that brought XAP to apache are finally starting to run out of patience. on the other hand, it's possible that someone will show up on list tomorrow and say - XAP's cool but here's a patch that'll make it even cooler. if that happens, then that may be all that's needed to kick start the project. - robert - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
I am one of the pimary committers on XAP. As far as the board report, I just plain missed it until it was too late. As far as the community building is concerned, yes the lists are basically dead. However work does continue on the project, for better or worse. Part of the reason I stopped using the lists is that substantive responses were rare. The only thing I ever got comments on were things like naming and copyright notices. Of course that is a chicken and egg problem to some degree, there is no community so nobody uses the lists to discuss so there is no community. It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands what the point is? I like discussing technical issues with people but I don't like posting technical thoughts only to be met consistently by silence. At that point it becomes busywork, just going through the motions for the sake of appearances. The XAP project is not like projects like Kabuki that never did any development and never responded on the lists. There is active development and if someone ever posted to the lists I'm sure someone would respond. Right now posting on the lists feels like playing to an empty theater. James Margaris From: Robert Burrell Donkin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 11/14/2007 2:42 PM To: general@incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help (forgive the rambling reply) On Nov 12, 2007 4:47 PM, Noel J. Bergman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits XAP is an interesting case. in some ways, i think that XAP has always been short of just one independent developer showing up to scratch an itch. there was no end of endeavour in the early days from the team to try to fit in. the atmosphere has always been open, polite and encouraging to outsiders but the volumes of people turning up on list have just too far too low. i've tried to figure out some rational explanation for this but i don't have one. at apachecon EU, rob gave a very well attended session on XAP and many people had questions. but no one really showed up on list to follow up afterwards. not sure why. martin tried hard for quite a while to encourage the team to talk a lot more on the list without long term success. it's tough, though. i find it hard to explain why talking is vital for community building. most of the time, no one is listening but sometimes, just sometimes a few words flung out into the ether will connect with someone. one connection with someone who goes onto become a long term contributor then pays back the time spent on the rest. but if there really isn't anyone listening then the effort is really wasted. in many ways, the fault is mine. i probably should have found more time to actively promote community building and envanlegise (but JAMES took a lot more energy than i'd expected). i'm not an expert in this area but the design ideas seemed to me powerful and unusual enough to be worth allowing development to continue whilst there were developers willing to code. however, this unusual miss may be that this is a sign that the people that brought XAP to apache are finally starting to run out of patience. on the other hand, it's possible that someone will show up on list tomorrow and say - XAP's cool but here's a patch that'll make it even cooler. if that happens, then that may be all that's needed to kick start the project. - robert - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
Noel J. Bergman wrote: It appears that we have a number of projects to discuss: NMaven - mailing list shows steady activity. XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits WSRP4J - burst of activity during the Summer, nothing since. The issues do not appear to be the same in all cases. I had to review the archives, since there were no board reports. I still think we should close WSRP4J and afaik it's an open issue at the portals project. Carsten -- Carsten Ziegeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
It appears that we have a number of projects to discuss: NMaven - mailing list shows steady activity. XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits WSRP4J - burst of activity during the Summer, nothing since. The issues do not appear to be the same in all cases. I had to review the archives, since there were no board reports. --- Noel - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
I just updated the belated board report for NMaven. Apologies. I checked out the board reports site on Friday, saw the Nov. 14th deadline and then closed the browser. Regards, Shane On Nov 12, 2007 8:47 AM, Noel J. Bergman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It appears that we have a number of projects to discuss: NMaven - mailing list shows steady activity. XAP - mailing lists show almost no discussion, mostly JIRA issues and commits WSRP4J - burst of activity during the Summer, nothing since. The issues do not appear to be the same in all cases. I had to review the archives, since there were no board reports. --- Noel - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Projects in trouble or otherwise needing help
I re-submitted with NMaven, but we'll see if the Board accepts it. --- Noel - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
