[Zope-dev] Fishbowl not problem centered enough

[Ken Manheimer]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001 09:24:40 -0600, Casey Duncan <cduncan@kaivo.com>
wrote:

> "Jay, Dylan" wrote:
> > 
> > Fishbowl is a great idea but it seems to be that its solution focused rather
> > than problem focus. Perhaps if you had a page that listed all the problems
> > with zope or problems that need to be solved that isn't as easy as it could
> > be with zope. 

I think it would be helpful to have a "big picture", with goals and
objectives, into which to fit the pieces - would that address the kinds of
things you're talking about?

> The fishbowl is also "pull" technology, and so it is time-consuming to
> keep up with the developments. I personally find it to be cumbersome,
> limiting and not really conducive to actually getting stuff done.

I've really wanted to enable people to subscribe to notification about
changes to wiki pages, and to notifications about additions to the wiki.  
Unfortunately, i didn't have time to get to that in the WikiForNow
project.  As soon as i'm clear form a current project i *may* be able to
concentrate on at least formulating a reasonable quick-and-dirty way to do
notifications, and getting it done for the short term.  Whether or not
it's me doing it, i think we're going to be bringing more attention to
these issues.

> I know there has been talk of opening up the Zope CVS to outside
> contributions, I personally think this is long overdue. In order for a
> community development forum to really work, this would have to happen.

This actually is high in our priorities, but the key players have been
swamped.  From a discussion w/paul recently i think we'll be getting
some more attention to doing this, very soon.

> > I just see lots of solutions many of which attack some of the same problems
> > and no clear way to get those people comunicating and making informed
> > trade-offs

I think the fishbowl, as it is, is a good significant move towards
exposing the process and enabling involvement.  Mailling lists help
conduct the collaboration.  However, more is needed to facilitate that
process - selectively enabling checkins, doing notifications to make
tracking of developments manageable, fleshing out the context
(problems/big picture).  It's an incremental process, and we may have
lapsed too long in progressing on those increments - perhaps we need
to chart out some of these critical pieces, so we can better formulate
how they're being attacked - and maybe enable more help with the
increments.

I hope to have expore this some, internally, and have more to say
about it next week.

Ken Manheimer
klm@digicool.com