On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Upayavira <u...@odoko.co.uk> wrote: > I presume you are not a Google employee. I'd appreciate it if you would > speak about Shindig from a non-google perspective. >
He's not, so he couldn't :) This is because, understandably, Google does dominate Shindig. For > graduation, the major concern is that sufficient space has been created > in the project for non-Google contributors to participate on an equal > footing. > > What I do notice is that activity here is fast. I read very little of > the traffic on this list. As a mentor, I simply cannot keep up. Does > this form a barrier for someone who would like to work on/with Shindig, > but cannot do so (a) full time (b) on the West Coast USA (c) based from > a Google office (d) etc? > Ian in this example is from the UK, my self I'm from the Netherlands and we have some chaps from for instance the BBC who are from the UK as well .. I'm not going to go guess percentages, but at least some of that heavy traffic you refer to is generated from non Googlers, non full time shindig developers, who are in fact not located on the US West Coast :) While it is a partially valid point you are making, it's not nearly as much as it used to be anymore; Geographically we're much more spread out as Shindig was at it's inception, and also the initial-company vs independent contributors has vastly improved too, I might be cheating a little bit by looking at 'currently most active committers' instead of the full committers list, but if you'd allow for that slightly positive perspective on things we have 4 very active Googlers and 4 'independent' committers. So while the presence might still be construed as relatively initial-company-heavy, we've also past the point where the project was dependent only on that company. Also from a contributions point of view we're seeing very regular patches from lots of independent parties, which to me also indicates good project health and interest. As the discussion on gene...@incubator noted, most projects only attract one new contributor during it's incubation, so with 4 new independent committers (it was actually 5, until i went and joined Google), we're doing quite well and I think this does say something about us being open and accessible as a project. Well.. if you don't mind reading lots of mail, but the amount of mail never has been a measure for the openness of a community, else the LKM would've surely meant the demise of linux :) I would even go so far as to say it's a sign of health, if all those discussions and decisions were made off-list, then we'd have a problem -- Chris
