Hi All, First up, appologies for not being more forward with discussing the Highland Gathering event, I'm afraid I've just been swamped getting work done. I'm remain very busy, so don't have much time available to sit and chat and pontificate. I'll try and quickly pop and suggest topics for discussion, but alas they won't be a nice structured take on things, it'll be a bit here a bit there.. Anyway here goes one area of discussion - Mailing lists :-)
Proposal of an osg-build mailing list: One of the big topics of discussion at the Gathering was build systems. I won't go into this topic here as it'll take us here till the new year. One suggestion that got alround support is that of setting up a osg-build mailing list. This mailing list would be for all the developers that want to get involved in discussion and development of alternative build systems to what we have now. -- Proposal of a osg-???? volunteer mailing list: This second mailing list was seen as important, but at the time we couldn't come up with a sensible and appropriate name. This role of this list would be as a place for those volunteers that help put together the OSG releases and binary distributions and maintain website, servers and services etc. This list would hopefully help us coordinate getting things done that need doing and covering for each other when a volunteer is unavailable. We did explore this area quite extensively going from do we need a committee through to whether such a group of people need to be selected, should some discussions be private etc. The realization by the end was that the open aspect to the community effort that is the OpenSceneGraph project is really is what is crucial. Also people volunteer to do stuff that they feel capable of doing and have time and inclination to do. This bunch of people arn't selected, there are entirely self selected, people come up and do some work such windows or OSX binaries etc. You can expect people do any particular task in a open source project, people just do it or not. We have to acknowledge and celebrate it ;-) Anyway such a mailing list for the ramshackle bunch of engineers that doing all this unpaid grunt work was certainly seen as useful and seen as crucial as to be completely open - everybody can look at the archives of disucssions and everybody can subscribe and contribute to the discussions and effort if they so wish. The difficult part we didn't come up with any appropriate solution for was the name of such a group of people and the name of list... we came up with lots of names but none worked. This morning I was thinking about analogies of open source development and ships travelling across great oceans came to mind, those on board are the crew who help keep it on course and running efficiently. So osg-crew? Um... perhaps it would grow on me... To look for alternatives I turned to the web: http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/crew Main Entry: crew Part of Speech: noun Definition: workers Synonyms: aggregation, assemblage, band, bevy, bunch, cluster, collection, company, complement, congregation, corps, covey, crowd, faction, gang, hands, herd, horde, lot, mob, organization, pack, party, posse, retinue, sect, set, squad, swarm, team, troop, troupe, working party So which would be your favourite? -- Disucssion and developer and user mailing lists: Right now we have just osg-users for both developer and user discussions. Its been be debate now and again about the possible value of seperating out into osg-users and osg-developers. The motivation being that as the project grew traffic would get too great to have one list, and as the project itself matured that there would be a more natural seperation between developers and users. So we discussed this topic, and there wasn't any real drive that osg-users was a problem as it is. The project has matured and the user base has grown but over the past year traffic has stabilised. Another factor is that as the community grows so does the number of developers. The percentage of contributors vs users has actually slighty increased from 13% to 14% over the last year, so as new users join osg-users, so new contributiors arise not long after. To me this shows that as a community there isn't a them and us when it comes to users and developers, we are all developers and users there isn't any real division. I believe this is a good thing to recognise this and keep everybody together as one big happy family. -- Forums vs mailing lists vs both The gist of the discussion on this topic were basically "Some people prefer forums some mailing lists" and that having one point of support was crucial for efficiency of the core developers/support crew. The only way to reconcile this is to have a system that allows you to use a forum or a mailing list, but with the content from both going in and out as one source. If such a combined system is workable then I'm all for it, but we needn't panic about getting it working ASAP, the mailing lists we have are effective and are working well so we can decide on timing of a move across based on a solid base position. We also need volunteers to help set up and maintain such a system. Looking at previous threads on this it looks like we already have a volunteer for this in the for of Gordon Tomlinson, so perhaps he give us his thoughts ;-) -- Thanks all folks :-) Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
