| [technology-pmc] Technology PMC review of PTP project |
Greg,As a representative of the Technology PMC, I'd like to offer some feedback on the PTP project to you (as the project lead) and to all the other PTP committers. I'm also volunteering to be your PMC contact and project mentor.
Overall, we believe that the project is on the right track. User questions seem to be getting answered, bugs are making their way into Bugzilla (although not as actively recently), and there appears to be a healthy collaboration on the mailing lists.
The community size still appears to be small, but that may be related to the pre-1.0 maturity and the domain of the project (not having as broad of a potential audience as more common developer tools). However, we have a few thoughts on some actions that might help to grow the strength of the PTP community:
* Make it easy for users to get started either through tools (an installer) or through detailed checklists and instructions. I've noticed that your project has made some improvements in this area in the last couple weeks. Great job -- keep it up!
* As has been done in the last couple weeks, continue to make sure documents linked from the web site are relatively up-to-date. For instance, make sure the Release Plan, Design Document, and Work Tasks reflect where the project is today.
* Good job with planning a demo and talk at EclipseCon -- make sure attendees know how easy it is for them to get involved and help make the project better.
* Good job posting the minutes to the conference calls; however, you could do a better job with letting people know in advance the time/ date and call-in info for the meeting. Consider making sure a notice is sent to the newsgroup and mailing list earlier than the day of/ before the meeting. You might also even consider posting the next meeting time/date on the site's home page. Teleconferences can be very useful, but they can also inadvertently exclude interested potential contributors if it's not obvious that everyone is invited to attend and provided enough notice to do so.
* Your contributors page (http://www.eclipse.org/ptp/ contributors.html) has a long list of "Supporters". I assume this list was put together when the project was proposed. Since the project is now well underway, you might consider getting back in touch with some of the organizations to see if they are now interested in getting involved to any extent.
Cliff