Hi Andrew,
> What is the best way for someone to have some input to the future
> direction of the product. I know one can enter RFEs
> via the issue traker. But this tends to be much to granular with the
> limitation of one issue per entry. I am thinking more of
> a discussion about an overall approach. Using just this type of tool I
> am afraid will too easily allow one to miss the forsest
> for the trees.
Good question. And difficult to answer, unfortunately.
Approaching it from the one side:
I, as owner of the DBA project, have an opinion into which direction
Base should evolve. More precise, I have an opinion on which area should
be addressed in the next version of OpenOffice.org Base. [1] I'd say
this opinion is backed up on what I think is OOo's target market, from
what I hear from people not/working with OOo Base, and the like.
Unfortunately, I am not free in scheduling all my and my team's time as
I like, since my employer has a certain interest in OpenOffice.org too.
And since my employer pays my bills, I cannot completely disregard this :)
Approaching it from the other side:
The OpenOffice.org community can/should develop ideas and visions on the
main focus(es) of the next version(s). Those should be discussed, and
the people doing the actual coding can implement what was considered
most wothy for the next version. In practice, not the first item (the
community discussions, this already happes in rather informal ways) is
the difficult one, but the "most worthy". This is highly subjective, of
course.
For OOo 2.0, there had been a "Product Concept Document" explaining what
was the, well, concept for the next product release. This document was
mainly driven by Sun, and so will, I assume, any successor document
which deals with post-2.0. This, IMO, is okay since Sun still pays the
vast majory of developers actually working on the code base (plus the
OOo infrastructure). Or, to say it the other way round: This document
described what Sun was willing to invest resources into, which means it
describes what was going to happen on the product's feature side [2].
Effectively, this means: There's no dedicated "Let's discuss the future
of OOo" forum. But there are a lot of channels (mailing lists and, yes,
IZ) by which people can communicate their wishes. Somebody needs to
distill those thousands of wishes into a vision/plan/concept for OOo 2.x.
I fear this distillation process is less transparent than it should be
(see [3] for all information I'm aware of), but it's happening. And it's
also taking into account user feedback, since both IZ (and IZ votes) and
mailing lists are read by the relevant people, or at least by people who
are approached by the relevant people for their opinion ...
> My first impression is that this list would be the proper venue. There
> are plenty of folks over at the Forum site that discussing
> wish lists for version 3.0, but I have no idea if any (or perhaps should
> say how much) of that actually makes to those that can
> make decisions.
Well, forums, honestly ... Personally, I don't like forums too much
(they're usually much less convenient that news groups, or, if it must
be, mailing lists), so I'm not a frequent visitor. Also given that there
is no "THE OpenOffice.org forum", I suppose it might be that more of the
people mentioned above are missing the forums, and everything going on
there.
Ciao
Frank
[1] in case you're asking: "Application Development with Base". This
implies the need for some competitive features, and some large
amount of work in the Programmability area.
[2] I'm serious about this "feature side". There's a lot of highly
valueable contribution from non-Sun people to OpenOffice.org, and
OOo would be dramatically poorer without it. But in terms of actual
features the user can see and use in the final product, Sun still
plays the major role.
[3]http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/handling_RFEs.html
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