[Zope-dev] Re: Fishbowl?

[Brian Lloyd]

> It's been mentioning that ZC doesn't pay attention, so proposals go in 
> and nothing happens.  Bugzilla won't fix that problem.  I'll add that 
> the community doesn't always pay good enough attention.  Sure, people 
> will say "when will we have versioning" or "when will we have web 
> services".  We go off, make a proposal, and email zope-dev.  No feedback 
> -- I take that back, each has received one response, whether by wiki 
> comment, mailing list response, or private response.

This is just a guess, but I suspect that this is a sort of unfortunate 
cycle developing: people post proposals, get (understandably) dismayed 
at the response time and end up not spending much time there, either 
contributing or providing feedback.

My gut feeling is that the root of this is an ease-of-use problem. We 
all want to do well-reasoned, professional development in a publicly 
visible (and usable) forum. Achieving that means a certain amount of 
ceremony (proposals, projects or something different that achieves the 
same goals). The big problem right now is that the mechanics of the 
ceremony are way too painful, especially WRT tracking changes.

When we first opened the fishbowl, it was with the certainty that we 
wouldn't get it right immediately. That's why we went with the intentially 
low-tech approach of a pile of Wikis. That first step actually worked 
pretty well for a while until we hit critical-Wiki-mass and there were 
suddenly too many proposals / projects to follow easily. So please don't 
think that we are somehow attached to the current fishbowl implementation 
as some sort of be-all-end-all.

When we first put it in place, we were minimal with the fishbowl, applying 
Jim's second law of engineering ("You can't solve a problem until you know 
the answer".) Now I think we a lot more about the answer:

  - The fishbowl needs to be integrated with email in order to stay on 
    people's radar.

  - There needs to be a way to "filter the firehose" so that people on 
    all sides can focus on the things they care about.

  - There needs to be a much lighter-weight way of seeing an overview 
    of what's going on (where proposals are in the process and why).

  - There is still a legitimate need for "content areas" that capture
    artifacts related to projects.

  - We need to find a way to scale the process of pushing proposals 
    through to projects.

  - There needs to be much more clarity on what should happen when a 
    proposal is approved, rejected, ignored, whatever, by the community.


The last one is very important IMHO. I just looked, and there are 
currently 15 proposals in the "awaiting resources" state, meaning 
that the general idea seems to have met with approval by the developer 
community and that now someone needs to actually sign up to _do_ it. 

Unfortunately, I have not been approached by anyone about any of 
these proposals, except for occasional flame-o-grams demanding to 
know why they are not done yet.

Part of this, I'm sure, is that the community of committers is still 
fairly small and still getting their bearings. We need to do a better 
job of helping developers get actively involved - but we'll never have a 
happy community if "awaiting resources" means "awaiting ZC resources".

Ken has written a fair amount on the current fishbowl problems at:

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/FishbowlManageability


How should we go about getting from that + this thread to some 
concrete solutions?


Brian Lloyd        brian@zope.com
Software Engineer  540.361.1716       
Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com