On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 17:55 -0400, Frank W. Zammetti wrote: > robert burrell donkin wrote: > > if the new subproject is anything like the commons then each component > > will have it's own development rhythm. > > I think this is a cogent point... if the idea is that this is like a > Commons project, than I have to ask the question: why not just have a > few new Commons projects, as was my original proposal?
The relevant questions are: * what percentage of the existing commons developers are interested in working on web components * what percentage of the prospective web developers are interested in participating in other commons projects * what percentage of users and interested in both web and normal commons projects. If the answer to any of these is high then the benefits of a combined community outweigh the nuisance of excessive emails, overly-large subproject lists and general distraction. I would guess the critical threshold to be about 25% - but I don't think that will be reached, ie I believe that less than 25% of existing commons committers would be interested in web commons components of the sort proposed. Therefore having such components in the existing commons will just annoy people without having any significant benefits (other than allowing this startup hassle for "web commons" to be skipped). Already we have people (both developers and users) agitating for separate per-component mail lists due to the volume of emails in commons. Some people have stated that they refuse to subscribe or be part of the community while there is a shared list. I would hate to see separate lists, but they have a point - there is an upper limit to the amount of mail people can handle (esp. people on dial-up connections; filtering by mail subject doesn't reduce the bandwidth needed to download all the mails). There is also the issue of community size. Commons has a couple of dozen regular committers, which means we all recognise each other's names. That's quite important I think, and brings some sense of team membership. Diluting this with another dozen developers (I hope "web commons" will grow to that size!) may change that sense of community (esp. if we don't have many interests in common). And likewise for new "web commons" committers - I think the sense of a team will be stronger with a separate project/mail-list etc. I admit it's all guesswork and a little crystal-ball-gazing. If web-commons is a failure, ie only a couple of projects get off the ground, then the existing commons would be a better home. But I hope that's not the case - there does seem to be a reasonable number of ideas and people willing to push them forward. Regards, Simon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
