Re: [udig-devel] community meeting?

[Chris Holmes <cholmes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Jody Garnett wrote:

> I have asked around a bit about starting community meetings (with a bit 
> of prompting from David - thanks David).
> 
> So far some excellent, and wide ranging, suggestions have been provided:
> - start as soon as possible
> - distribute development as soon as possible
> - start earlier then geotools (say 11 PST) to those in Europe a bit more 
> sleep
> - IRC like geotools? Conference call like geoapi?
> - choose a different day then geotools? Run concurrently with geotools?
> - bi weekly, keep a constant IRC channel open
> 
> What do people enjoy? There are lots of wonderful ideas we can pursue as 
> a community, I would like the first meeting to be about setting up a 
> community
> svn and nightly build environment. We are close to exhausting our 
> Confluence capabilities at Code Haus but wiki space would be worthwhile 
> as well.
I'm a bit confused.  Would this community be the people developing uDig, 
or developing plugins for uDig?  Or are you seeing those as the same 
thing?  I guess I'm a bit confused by what the community svn would be, how 
you would get permissions on it?  What would be there?  How is it 
different then the uDig svn? Are people asking for this?  Or are you 
hoping that just by setting it up people will come?  

I actually sort of doubt that there's a ton of people who will start 
developing plug-ins for uDig if only they had some community space, I 
think most are more waiting to see how it all turns out, before investing 
a ton of time in a shifting target.  Granted that's a bit of a catch-22, 
since they could actually make it better, which is why I think it's 
ultimately worthwhile to do most of these suggestions (indeed Rob getting 
TOPP involved in GeoTools was a similar situation, shifting target, having 
to do much of the work, but the community was set up in an open 
structure).  I guess what I'm basically saying in an offhand way is get 
started soon, and keep at it even if it seems like no one cares.  They 
will once uDig starts to tighten up, and you may snag a few early 
adopters, but even if you don't you will have a real open source structure 
set up.  I just read the Cathedral and the Bazaar 
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/), which has a lot of 
good stuff on the issue of how community works in open source (I know, I 
should have read it long ago).  And basically my reservations come from 
the fact that I personally haven't been able to download uDig and have it 
'run' without a bunch of effort on my part.  But I also haven't tried out 
0.5 yet.  

As for the suggestions, yes start as soon as possible, distribute 
development as soon as possible.  Which you've been good about, but one 
thing I would add is to test things out a lot more before a release.  I 
personally have downloaded uDig since 0.2, but generally stop after a few 
minutes, as something doesn't work, and I'm not sure what's supposed to 
work.  I just hold out for the next one, when in reality it's probably 
some small issue that could have been easily fixed.  I used to spend a 
full day between finalizing a release and actually making it available for 
download, pretty much all on testing that final code.  It's way more chill 
now, since my codebase is stable, but when things are shifting, and when 
users are few, it's essential.  

Definitely go with irc over conference calls.  And I really, really like 
keeping an IRC channel open.  I think you should use the geotools channel, 
and indeed I think geotools developers should start hanging out there 
instead of just on the closed ym that we do now.  Most all my favorite 
open source projects have irc channels of people to help out at most any 
time.  And I think it's great if you're really wanting to develop 
'community', as you really talk to people, directly. 

Chris

> 
> Jody
> _______________________________________________
> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
> http://udig.refractions.net
> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
> 

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