On 10/29/2012 11:33 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 8:16 PM, Peter Junge <peter.ju...@gmx.org> wrote:
On 9/27/2012 8:49 AM, Andrew Rist wrote:
On 9/24/2012 9:46 PM, Peter Junge wrote:
Dear OpenOffice Community,
During ApacheCon Europe 2012 (ACEU 2012; http://apachecon.eu/), we
will hold a 90-minute session on the state of the community. Our topic
is as broad as the community and includes discussion on how to develop
and further the community of contributors and users making up AOO. We
hope you can be there and add your voice! We seldom have opportunity
to meet in person, and this will be a great occasion to go over where
we are as a community, what we need to do to improve the operations of
the community, and what can be done by us all to take AOO to top-level
status. Everyone is invited—and to encourage you further to
participate, we hope to welcome the Apache mentors who are helping AOO
move ahead.
At the moment, I'm responsible for this session but due to the fact
that I'm located in Beijing I will not be able to attend in person.
Hence, it would be great to find one or two volunteers to host this
BoF session about the AOO community at the ApacheCon Europe.
I would be interested, Peter.
Andrew
@Andrew, sorry for replying quite late, but I guess my first posting came to
long before the event anyway.
@All: Let's discuss what what could be talked about during the BoF session
on AOO community in Sinsheim. (Note: I'm not attending the ApacheCon EU.)
After reviewing a couple of threads in the mailing list archives, I'd like
to point out the challenges below:
1) The challenge of dissimilarity of community and community culture: We've
seen it in a couple of discussions on the mailing lists. The Apache Way and
the former OOo community work quite different, a couple of time disagreement
with the mentors arose. Apache is a community where committers leave their
affiliations behind (at least in theory) while OOo was under the hood of a
single company. At Apache the individual needs to earn merits to be promoted
as a committer and later as a PMC member, while OOo everybody just could
right away. Apache has a hierarchy of roles (contributor, committer, PMC)
but no real leaders (except the PMC chair), while OOo didn't know such
hierarchy but had appointed project leads who had certain administrative
powers. At Apache, I assume, at least 80% are developers because so far the
majority of projects were about producing software by developers for
developers, while OOo and still AOO is a large piece of software for end
users. At the old OOo community, and I guess many of them are still around
but not visible here, more then half of the people involved were not
developers, but many volunteers working on localization, QA, documentation,
user support and marketing etc. The OOo community was strongly
heterogeneous, many native language projects had their own websites and
communication channels, detached from the core community. So, the first
challenge is: How does that all fit into the Apache way, but still keeping
the identity of OpenOffice and leaving room for the satellite communities
that do great work e.g. by offering OO support in many different languages?
I don't know if I'd make this be a large focus. Look around. By my
count the majority of the current contributors to the project are new
to it from Apache. They don't all have the baggage from OOo
experience. They understand AOO on Apache terms. We're doing it
Apache style. It is working. We're getting new language volunteers
every other day or so. Maybe it is time to let go of OOo style
community thinking and embrace what we have at Apache. It may not be
perfect. But it is working.
At least 75% of the PMC have been with the former OOo community.
Anyway, is carrying baggage necessarily bad? Consider, many of those who
left behind from OOo are well over 40, hence we might be stubborn in
keeping those things that were good with the old community.
Nonetheless, embracing what we have at Apache --as you propose-- might
be the result.
2) The challenge producing end user software at Apache:
As said above, Apache was so far (at least AFAIK) only producing software
from developers for developers, contrarily AOO is an end user software. The
former usually doesn't need any special promotion effort. Developers and
users just come by if they need a particular piece of software. With an end
user software like OpenOffice this is much different. AOO needs a big
marketing effort to reach its users and constantly growing that user base.
At the former OOo community many volunteers have been attending trade fairs
(e.g. the CeBIT in Hanover, Germany) and innumerous other events to reach
the public. Driving such efforts costs a fair amount of money that should
not be solely shouldered by the volunteers who already contribute a fair
mount of their time. So, the second challenge is, how to raise funds, either
within or outside Apache, to continue with appropriate marketing efforts for
AOO?
I think the challenge is to change the thinking that says a project
can only be successful if it raises money.
The project can certainly be successful in both ways. The way success
looks like will certainly be different.
3) The challenge of building the community:
The AOO community needs steadily working on developing the community by
recruiting developers, QA, translators and people doing documentation and
marketing. The third challenge is, how to reach them? A part of this effort
can certainly go along with the former challenge as 'marketing to
developers'. Being present at events usually reaches many different kinds of
people.
The recent growth in translation volunteers is purely due to adding a
single paragraph to a few Native Language websites. I think we
sometimes fail to appreciate how many people visit our websites and
how many are willing to volunteer, if only we would ask. So before we
start fund-raising to send volunteers to conference to speak to 60
people in a room, let's try speaking to 250 thousand people who visit
our home page each day.
I certainly mean events with more than 60 people, e.g. being present at
the CeBIT was always a big success for OOo. Of course, maintaining the
website is crucial but those activities do not exclude each other.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we have not done a single "call for
volunteers" blog post, press release or feature on our home page since
this project started. Isn't that the obvious way to start? I think
so. But I'm scared at the volume of responses we would probably get
from such a request. That is why I am emphasizing getting our
documentation in order, identifying easy bugs, etc., so we can cope
with the volume of volunteers we will get.
As said above, different approaches do not exclude each other.
The nice part of getting more volunteers is that we also increase our
geographical diversity. Right now we are pretty heavy in Hamburg and
Beijing forever. If we can quadruple the number of volunteers over
the next year, and also the geographical diversity, then we should be
able to handle a lot more conferences with local volunteers, without
need for special travel expense reimbursement. And if at the same
time we grow the number of people making money from AOO-related work,
then they may be willing to pay for themselves to promote AOO and
their own work. That is why I am working on the consultants directory
and similar.
Totally agree.
That's the way to grow. Raising money to send the existing volunteers
to travel to more places is only growth for the airline industry. It
is not growth for the project. We need to find people who are able to
succeed in a business based on enhancing or supporting the OpenOffice
product to businesses and users.. A business based on promoting the
OpenOffice open source project is not really a business model. I
don't think we want to encourage anyone to think of making a career as
a professional OpenOffice community manager or anything like that.
My personal idea would also be keeping the local focus. when speaking of
funding, I do not mean funding a single person with thousands of Euro
respectively dollars, but fund those who are nearby with 200 Euro or
even far less for a railway trip and a night of accommodation, if
necessary.
My opinion, for what it is worth.
Thanks, you make some good points and I do not think that we disagree
too much, just looking from different angles.
Peter
-Rob
Other challenges are welcome.
Best regards,
Peter
P.S: and there's still the challenge to find one or two moderators for that
BoF session. Andrew, are you still willing?
