On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Oliver Bleutgen wrote: Regarding the thread about the "stalled" community and documentation issues in general, what can we, as a community, do? I'm a community organizer by history, so I think this is a worthwhile question to ask. I think it would help to re-cap what we've said and to list what the possibility that have been raised are. Some good suggestions that were raised: * some people prefer RPMS (& they're not neccessarily bad people) I'm comfy with unpacking and making, but my I'm a Unix weenie. Some people aren't. Some are and prefer RPMS (I do for _many_ things, for instance). Some people (for good security reasons) don't have gcc/make on their webservers, and find it difficult to make-elsewhere-then-move. So, can we make RPMS for Zope? True, some OSS project don't provide RPMS; some (MySQL, PostgreSQL) do, and on these projects, we recognize that people who want to play around, test something out, etc., will install and RPM and play, whereas if they felt that had to do a "hard install", they wouldn't. * there's lots of knowledge on the ML and lots in the HOWTOs, but it takes a while to search Can someone (or a team) step forward and be willing to play librarian with the HOWTOs, perhaps categorizing them better, dividing them into definitely-outdated-no-longer-important versus diamond-in-the-rough. Can they have more keywords and a better search engine? * Products are half-finished or don't work with all versions Can someone extend the Products Product so that Products can be commented on, rated, and listed as working with certain versions of Zope? Does anyone want to work on the batteries-included distro of Zope that would include popular but non-core things like exUserFolder, CMF, TransparentFolders, etc.? * ZDP seems dead in the water Yep it does. Does somebody want to start the conversation about what role user-contributed docs will play? How will this be different than the HOWTOs at zope.org? * We lack some reward systems Someone pointed out in the thread that if you design projects, they can help you with consulting and your resume, more than the "good feeling" that comes from writing docs or coordinating systems. This may be true for many of us (I have to work to eat, for instance). So: what reward systems can we think of that will reward those who do the organizing and documentation-writing? Does ZC have some t-shirts to kick forth? A Zope Community prize to Best Contributors? Prominent, rotating mention on the zope.org site? If you haven't helped out and can give voice to what might motivate you, please say so. It will help. * We (sometimes) lack coordination Does somebody want to step forward as a coordinator-of-coordinators, keeping a list like this of non-programming projects that need help, so that when we have some time, we know where to apply our talents? So, so far, we have the following volunteer positions open: * RPM maintainer * HOWTO categorizers/maintainers * HOWTO product improvements * Product improvements * Product library maintainers * ZDP team * Volunteer coordinator I'm interested in working on the HOWTOs: helping categorize, modernize, etc. Anyone want to join me? Anyone want to do anything else? -- Joel BURTON | joel@joelburton.com | joelburton.com | aim: wjoelburton Independent Knowledge Management Consultant