[Grok-dev] organizing the Grok community

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Paul Wilson over on the grok-doc mailing suggested we organize the Grok 
project's community better, and I think that's a great idea. This is 
what we came up with. I've tried to keep it simple and fairly informal.

development group
-----------------

Responsible for the Grok codebase and various affiliated projects.

We talk on grok-dev at zope.org. Note that grok-dev is also the "main" list 
where all groups should report to.

documentation group
-------------------

Responsible for the Grok documentation. In part this is in the Plone 
site, and in part it's maintained in SVN for the "official documentation".

We talk on grok-doc at zope.org

web feature group
-----------------

Responsible for the contents of the Plone website on grok.zope.org, 
organizing features and layout, doing news items, structure and such. 
The main thing that isn't done is the actual contents of the 
documentation, which is done by the documentation group.

I don't think we have a mailing list for this. I wonder what that means. :)

web admin group
---------------

Responsible for making sure that grok.zope.org continues running and 
works well.

We talk on grok-web-adm at googlegroups.com

We need a web page on grok.zope.org that describes these groups, and 
perhaps a separate web page under these per group. It also needs to 
contain the information I'm going to talk about next.

Group leaders and membership
----------------------------

Each group needs:

* a leader

* the names of the people who are "in" the group, with some particular 
areas of interests mentioned.

This should make it easier for people to join these groups and talk to 
the right people.

I don't expect the list of people in groups to be complete; we have an 
especially large group of developers, for instance. We just need to have 
some people we know are interested in this, that we all know what we can 
talk to when certain things come up.

Um, to recognize my own position, I think I'm the development leader and 
the overall manager of the whole project, which makes me feel 
responsible for everything. :) I also think I'm currently in all these 
groups, but I definitely don't want to be in charge of all them... I 
just want to be able to loosely sketch out some ideas for some of these 
groups and having some hope that they'll happen (wouldn't that be 
great?). Ideally and even better is for the groups to come up with their 
own ideas!

I think many people will be in more than one group - for instance I 
would like most developers to be interested in documentation at the very 
least, and when we do a release, we mess around with the website.

Reporting and communication
---------------------------

The responsibility of the group's leader is to regularly (bi-weekly?) 
report to grok-dev what has happened, and what is planned. We can 
discuss this and make sure things keep moving along.

Naturally group leaders will manage the discussion on the group's list, 
and post tasks. But they can also post tasks to grok-dev if they like, 
to hopefully get more people interested and active.

Regards,

Martijn