So what will we do? (was [Zope] What causes the community to stall so often?)

[Joel Burton]

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definitely-outdated-no-longer-important versus diamond-in-the-rough.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