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