For Harmony to be successful we need to grow the active development community from where we are now. Thinking about how we grow, I see a couple of goals:
- expand the number of people contributing to development After the initial and necessary work to set the legal framework for contribution, we now need to make it clear how people can get involved and contribute to Harmony. The paperwork can look daunting, so a summary on the website/wiki would be good. We have got code contributions in the VM and class library space. The committers should spend time describing how that existing code works as well as continuing active development. Some of that description may be best done here on the list, and some of that may be more static on the website. We should describe a set of near-term goals, to show people where we are going and where they can help. Putting some issues into JIRA as we work on them will help, but also an indication of simple fixes/major tasks on the wiki or website would give everyone a sense of project direction. Archie's suggestion of publishing snapshots is great. If we publish regular snapshots with a summary of advances and capabilitites then we will encourage developers (and maybe reckless users<g>) to give it a spin. - expand the existing committers responsibility The Harmony website is looking unloved. IMHO all committers should feel responsible for keeping it up to date and relevant. Looking at the list of incubator projects [1], I see there are eight mentors for Harmony, and there are 13 committers for Harmony on Jim's committer list [2]. I realize that not all mentors and committers are going to be equally active on the project, but shouldn't the active committers be members of the PPMC? [1] http://incubator.apache.org/projects [2] http://people.apache.org/~jim/committers.html - don't get me wrong I don't mean this note to sound negative; far from it, I want to share some of the enthusiasm and excitement for the project as widely as possible. Consider it a call to arms for everyone, and especially the existing committers (by which of course I include myself). I promise to put aside time beyond code development to address some of the issues above, update the website and document some of the project successes to date (will have to understand Anakia first <g>) -- will you join me? Regards, Tim -- Tim Ellison ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) IBM Java technology centre, UK.
