Hi,
These are interesting links, with some useful tips - I'll definitely try to
respond to patches soon after they're sent, instead of (as sometimes
happens) a few weeks later.
The roadmap stuff is interesting, too. What's there isn't completely
relevant to SMW, since that guy is coming from the perspective of projects
like GIMP and Inkscape - basically clones of existing software, where the
set of needed features is (fairly well) agreed on ahead of time, so the
roadmap can include dates and start to resemble a future release schedule.
In our case, we're in uncharted territory - no one can say for sure which
features will be useful and which won't, or what the best solution is to a
given problem. Our roadmap is more like a "to-do list", which I think is the
right way to go for us.
Having a set of independent projects for people to work on could be useful.
It might make sense to just do that as part of the existing roadmap page -
we could have asterisks next to tasks that could be done as independent
projects. Fixing the security leak in the 'ploticus' format, for instance,
is something a new developer could do (assuming it can be done at all). And
there are a bunch of smaller tasks that I (and others) haven't even put on
the roadmap page, since it seemed to be more about providing a high-level
overview than creating a task list. But having a single page seems to make
more sense than having two pages with some overlapping contents.
-Yaron
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
> Some insightful comments on how to grow and sustain contributor
> communities in OSS:
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Roadmaps and getting and keeping devs
> Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:55:34 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> These have been circulating in the open source Twitterspere today.
> They struck me as apposite to discussions on these topics around
> MediaWiki.
>
> How to write a roadmap:
>
> http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/02/07/drawing-up-a-roadmap/
>
> How to grow your contributor community (and how to decimate it):
>
> http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/open-source-community-simplified/
>
>
> - d.
> -------------------------------------
>
> Not always applicable to all of our (sub)projects, but we can surely
> take some things from this. Two things from the second link that SMW
> should concretely improve (in co-operation with all extension projects):
>
> (1) A list of easy starting projects (nothing there right now).
>
> (2) Excellent, complete, and simple documentation describing exactly how
> a contribution should be done (largely incomplete, and focussed on
> general hints/rules/warnings but not on concrete contribution paths).
>
> It might be worth thinking about how this can be achieved. (2) could
> help all SMW extensions if placed visibly on our homepage (with pointers
> to extensions that welcome new contributors). (1) could allow more
> "non-critical" features (that are fun for newcomers) to get implemented
> at all (the core devs tend to focus on bug fixing and large-scale
> projects). In our case, this could also be a list of projects that could
> be done as mini-extensions.
>
> I recall having similar discussions in the past, but our start page
> clearly lacks the big fat "Contribute" button with easy first steps.
> Contributions are welcome ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Markus
>
>
>
>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE:
Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen.
Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle.
Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb
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