Hi Daniel, I am very inexperienced when it comes to the inner workings of open source project communities (successful as well as unsuccessful), and my comments should be viewed in this light.
First of all, you and the people you have gathered to work with you have created an amazing tool, and to my mind this is particularly impressive considering the fact that all the work done on it so far seems to have been exclusively on a volunteer basis. I love the open source principle and I would also love to volunteer much more of my time to support projects such as yours. The reality is, however, that I can only afford to use a very small amount of my time in this manner. From a purely practical perspective, the benefits of developing a reputation as a contributor to an amazing open source project must be weighed against the necessity to earn money to pay next month's bills. As I said, I am completely clueless when it comes to what makes an open source project successful, what motivates people to contribute and how they balance this with their other responsibilities, but I have the suspicion that other people may be in a situation similar to mine. If this is the case, then it might explain why the number of users continues to grow while the number of contributors has remained more or less constant - why 40,000 people have viewed your notice that you are looking for assistance in the marketing area, but only four people have responded. How do other open source projects such as Joomla or Moodle thrive? Is everyone working on these projects doing it for free? Do they just have that much free time? What about open source projects that have transitioned to a business-oriented model, such as Odoo (formerly OpenERP), while still keeping the core software open source? In any event, in my personal opinion, there are clearly far too many languages in use today to be able to ever claim to support them all, so the question becomes where to draw the line. I am strongly in favor of your suggestion #1. I might not throw poorly-maintained languages out completely, but I would definitely define a core set of languages that are well-maintained and communicate to the public that these are the languages officially supported by LT. Anything else will result in disappointed users. The other languages might be relegated to an "unmaintained" category with a notice that you are currently looking for support with these languages. I would be very interested to read what other people think about these points. Regards Ray > > Hi, > > the year is slowly coming to an end, so I thought I'd try to summarize > what we've achieved this year and how we can move LT forward in the > future. In 2015, we... > > * made three releases so far (2.9, 3.0, 3.1), another one is planned > * more than doubled the number of visits to languagetool.org (January: > 156,000, November: 326,000) > * released a Chrome extension with more than 1,500 users now > * added support for ngram models to detect confusion of (mostly) > homophones (English, German) > * did several things I forgot to list here > * added and improved many language-specific rules. Specifically, 14 > languages are maintained if you define this as "had at least ten commits > in its grammar.xml and disambiguation.xml files this year". However, > this also means 17 languages are not maintained. > > This last point of unmaintained languages highlights what I think is an > important issue: In the last three years, we increased our number of > users by a factor of 10. At the same time, the number of commits and > people who regularly contribute didn't grow at all (see attachment). > Many languages are not maintained, and even those that are often only > have a single contributor. If that contributor becomes inactive, finding > a new one seems almost impossible. If we continue like this, LT will > some day end up with very few languages that are actually maintained. As > there doesn't seem to be any correlation between number of users and > number of regular contributors, user growth won't help us. > > I have no solution for this problem, but some ideas I'd like to get > feedback on: > > (1) Clean up: throw out all unmaintained languages that also have less > than 100 rules. This way users don't get the false impression that their > language is supported when it actually isn't. It might also create some > motivation to contribute when users notice that "their" language is > being thrown out. > > (2) Grow the contributor community: somehow find new contributors to > revive the unmaintained languages and find contributors to support the > maintainers of languages that are already doing well. The thing is: I > have no idea how to do this. For example, we have a text on > languagetool.org saying we're looking for help with marketing. This text > has been shown to more than 40,000 visitors and the effect so far has > been zero (actually four people have contacted me, but three of those > have already disappeared). What is holding people back from becoming a > regular contributor? > > (3) Crowdsourcing: give up on finding qualified contributors, instead > develop tools that allow contribution via very, very simple means, like > clicking on correct and incorrect sentences. It's not clear how well > this could work. It might be combined with (4). > > (4) Statistics: give up on finding qualified contributors and find > errors using ngram statistics etc. With statistics, finding errors is > language-independent. Quality might be worse than with hand-written > rules, but for languages that are not maintained anyway there are often > hardly hand-written rules. Of course, everybody could still contribute > manually written rules and maybe revive language support that way. > > (5) Business: develop a business model and pay people for working on LT. > This is difficult, developing a business is a full-time job on its own. > Even if it worked, it would only cover very few mainstream languages. > > These are the options I can think of that go beyond "let's just keep > going". Yes, we could just keep going - for some languages, LT is in > good health. But to be a sustainable project in the long term, I think > we need either more than one contributor per language or we need a > technological approach that works without a maintainer per language. > > Please, everybody, let me know what you think and what ideas you have > about the future of LanguageTool. > > Regards > Daniel > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Go from Idea to Many App Stores Faster with Intel(R) XDK Give your users amazing mobile app experiences with Intel(R) XDK. Use one codebase in this all-in-one HTML5 development environment. Design, debug & build mobile apps & 2D/3D high-impact games for multiple OSs. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=254741911&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
