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[technology-pmc] [Fwd: OSEE initial observations]

Hello OSEE committers. Over the past week or so, I have been doing a review of the project. This is not a formal review as described by the Eclipse development process, but more of an informal review to see what the PMC can do to help you grow your community and eventually take over the world.

My view is that OSEE is doing a fair job of community development, especially considering the relative youth of the project. I'd like to see a little more outreach. Probably one of the easiest things that you can do to develop community is to regularly monitor your newsgroup and mailing lists to make sure that questions get answered. Given that the project is still new and that the current community is small, you cannot afford to lose even one potential user/contributor. Getting involved in domain-specific forums, blogging, and speaking at conferences are other activities that go a long way toward increasing knowledge of your project and finding others to contribute. A relatively small about of investment now should pay dividends later.

It seems as though the project committers are trying to work open and transparently. At present, however, it appears as though all planning is done in private and then communicated via bugzilla entries and an occasional message on the dev list. It'd be nice to see more discussion around planning occur in the open. Conference calls should be open to the public. Meeting minutes should be posted. Planning can also be done via the mailing lists; give others a chance to weigh in with their opinions before decisions are made. Early on in a project, you'll probably find that outside activity will be very small, but give an opportunity for the community to interact directly anyway. If you build it, they will come.

Growing a community is a vital ingredient for an open source project. Some of the most successful projects spend a great deal of their time working on community development (some committers spend as much as 25% of their time).

Here are some other observations/questions:

I hate to be a bear about this sort of thing, but the 0.4.0 "release" has to be taken down. Without a release review, there can be no release. I suggest that you schedule a short call with your mentors to discuss reviews.

There is little on the project web page to encourage contribution. It'd be good to see a page that describes how somebody who wants to help out can get the code from SVN, configure their workspace, ask questions, etc.

Does the project self-host? The website states that "The system captures project data into a common user-defined data model providing bidirectional traceability, project health reporting, status, and metrics which seamlessly combine to form a coherent, accurate view of a project in real-time." Is OSEE providing these services for itself? The FAQ seems to indicate that it does. Is this something that I can see for myself?

I noticed that the org.eclipse.osee.framework.core bundle doesn't contain an about.html file. For more information, see [2].

Does the project have regular calls? Is the community invited? Are the meeting minutes posted anywhere? If you're asking questions and making decisions, these questions and decisions need to be posed and posted for maximum transparency.

The mailing list, osee-dev [3], is virtually unused. The newsgroup [4] has more activity, but I have some concern that user's aren't getting the feedback they require. One entry states how the lack of feedback is hurting the chances of OSEE adoption for at least one organization [5]:

 I just want to give some feedback - in the last days I have evaluated
 OSEE for using it by one of our customer. You have a great product
 with many useful features, but I decide to use our own solution,
 because of lack of documentation (which I can accept for the new
 Eclipse project) and because I didn't get any answers on my questions
 in the news portal. So I don't have a good feeling, that I can
 customize OSEE to the customer's needs and can get support from the
 project committers.

 You have to invest more time in community support - that is very
 important for a new project and helps to set up the communication
 with (potential) users of the project.

The release schedule is incorrect and needs to be updated. It's showing a 0.5.0, and 0.6.0 release (in addition to the 0.4.0) marked as "complete". I do not see any release reviews nor are there any downloads related to these releases.

There is no project plan. This leads me to believe that the plan is private. Having a project plan will make it easier for other groups and individuals to contribute to your project.

What technology does osee use for persistence? Is there an opportunity to leverage existing technology like EclipseLink here?

All bugs against OSEE, except for one, have been created by project committers. In fact, most bugs were created by a single committer. I think it's great that you're using Bugzilla to track work being done on the project. This goes a long way in helping others get involved. I reviewed a random sample of the bugs, and almost all of them contain no more than a single comment or two. This leads me to believe that decisions are being made in private and that bugs are created to reflect those decisions. It'd be nice to see some discussion occuring in those bugs between the current committers and others in the community with decisions being made based on the feedback. This is likely just be a reflection of the relative youth of the project and should hopefully improve with time as the community develops.

Is there an OSEE blog? I'd love to see a blog aggregated on planet.eclipse.org and, perhaps, on a domain-specific blog aggregator.

What conferences/events are OSEE committers presenting at?

Are there any articles on OSEE that we can link to from the /resources page? Are there any article ideas that might fit well on Eclipse Corner (/articles)?

Thanks,

Wayne

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project_summary.php?projectid=technology.osee
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/guidetolegaldoc.php
[3] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/osee-dev/maillist.html
[4] http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.osee [5] http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/article.php?id=139&group=eclipse.technology.osee#139
[6] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Development_Resources/HOWTO/Parallel_IP_Process



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