I can think of a few concrete steps. First, generate more activity on this list. I am worried by statements like "Website is being worked on". If work is going on, why is it not being discussed on the list? Who is working on the web site? A community member, presumably? Everything on list, please.
Look at it from the perspective of those of us outside Wisconsin. To most of the world, the dev list *is* the project. By working on private lists, or face-to-face meetings, you are excluding your potential community. I am also worried about "getting some funding stability in place to gather resources". Look, I know developers have to eat. But if Jignesh is the rainmaker, it creates a particular social dynamic that could be damaging if it carries into the Apache community. I'd love to see the folks who are working on code -- Harshad Deshmukh, Navneet Potti, Craig Chasseur, Zuyu Zhang, Jianqiao Zhu -- participating in these kinds of discussions, and picking up the tasks to build the project. At Apache we say "community over code" and my sense is that this project is just heads down, building code, right now. As for those tasks. A web site is absolutely essential. A quick start guide is also a great idea. Talks are a great way to reach new people. Project members should be giving talks at meetups, conferences (especially open-source/business-oriented conferences, such as Hadoop Summit and ApacheCon). The lead time for conferences is 4-6 months, so you should be applying now. If project members are geographically distributed, ask them to give talks in their own area. A video talk or demo is also useful. Also, a single slide or graphic explaining what QuickStep is. And start generating one piece of content a week to put into the twitter feed. Lastly, the release. Releases are central to what Apache projects do. They involve community more than they involve code. The biggest misconception is that you have to fix bugs and make features before you release. A release is just a blob of intellectual property. There is considerable effort in making the first release, but it is all about the legal packaging. I think you should start working on the release right now. That means discussing goals, timescales, and assigning tasks, all of it on this list. You have enough features already. Keep your goals extremely limited, and you might be able to release in two months. Julian On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Jignesh Patel <[email protected]> wrote: > Great questions Julian and neat comments Greg. > > Website is being worked on, but need a bit more work before putting it up. > > Agreed — need to work on all this. The key question that we have to solve as > a group is getting some funding stability in place to gather resources to > work on things that you outline below, which is often hard to pull is as part > of student thesis (as you may know most of the initial developer community is > students). > > BTW — the goals were changes as one of the mentors objected to it :-) I think > it was a valid objection. > > I am actively developing guidelines to make it easier to allow developers > outside the core group to join. You may have seen the wiki pages that went up > recently. There is still a lot more to do there. Am also working on an quick > start guide. > > If anyone on this list sees opportunities for early actual users to try us > out, please point this group toward that. That would allow us to solve a lot > of problems! > > Cheers, > Jignesh > >> On Jun 17, 2016, at 12:04 PM, Gregory Chase <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> A few questions: >> >> 1. Who should be in Quickstep's Community? >> >> 2. Why should they join? >> >> 3. What do you want them to do? >> >> I'd change your goals as follows: >> >> 1. Create an ASF release >> 2. Acquire Early Adopters >> 3. Build a Community >> >> It's hard to attract people to a community when there is little to offer. >> >> Now, you can acquire some "early contributors" before the first ASF release >> if you provide a bread crumb trail for them to contribute: >> 1. Try out our daily snapshot >> 2. Test instructions to help provide feedback in the Jira >> 3. List of simple Jiras any first time contributor can solve (don't fix >> them yourself, make it easy for others to join) >> >> I'd also recommend posting a more informative website so that people know >> what it is that Quickstep offers and why it might interest them as a >> product and a community. >> >> -Greg >> >> On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Julian Hyde <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Hi Quickstep developers and community, >>> >>> Let’s have a discussion about how to build a community around Quickstep. >>> >>> In the last report, Quickstep’s goals were listed as >>> >>> 1. Acquire early adopters >>> 2. Acquire early adopters >>> 3. Acquire early adopters >>> >>> then changed to >>> >>> 1. Acquire early adopters >>> 2. Build a community. >>> 3. Create an ASF release. >>> >>> I’d like to see progress toward those goals. The main activity I see right >>> now is people checking in code; that’s important, but it isn’t very >>> effective at building community. >>> >>> What concrete steps can we take to acquire early adopters and help build a >>> community? >>> >>> Please don’t be shy. I’d like to hear from as many people as possible — >>> initial committers, mentors, and people who are on this list just because >>> they want to kick the tires. Tell us what you want from this project. >>> >>> Julian >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Greg Chase >> >> Global Head, Big Data Communities >> http://www.pivotal.io/big-data >> >> Pivotal Software >> http://www.pivotal.io/ >> >> 650-215-0477 >> @GregChase >> Blog: http://geekmarketing.biz/ >
