> It's been mentioning that ZC doesn't pay attention, so proposals go in
> and nothing happens. Bugzilla won't fix that problem. I'll add that
> the community doesn't always pay good enough attention. Sure, people
> will say "when will we have versioning" or "when will we have web
> services". We go off, make a proposal, and email zope-dev. No feedback
> -- I take that back, each has received one response, whether by wiki
> comment, mailing list response, or private response.
This is just a guess, but I suspect that this is a sort of unfortunate
cycle developing: people post proposals, get (understandably) dismayed
at the response time and end up not spending much time there, either
contributing or providing feedback.
My gut feeling is that the root of this is an ease-of-use problem. We
all want to do well-reasoned, professional development in a publicly
visible (and usable) forum. Achieving that means a certain amount of
ceremony (proposals, projects or something different that achieves the
same goals). The big problem right now is that the mechanics of the
ceremony are way too painful, especially WRT tracking changes.
When we first opened the fishbowl, it was with the certainty that we
wouldn't get it right immediately. That's why we went with the intentially
low-tech approach of a pile of Wikis. That first step actually worked
pretty well for a while until we hit critical-Wiki-mass and there were
suddenly too many proposals / projects to follow easily. So please don't
think that we are somehow attached to the current fishbowl implementation
as some sort of be-all-end-all.
When we first put it in place, we were minimal with the fishbowl, applying
Jim's second law of engineering ("You can't solve a problem until you know
the answer".) Now I think we a lot more about the answer:
- The fishbowl needs to be integrated with email in order to stay on
people's radar.
- There needs to be a way to "filter the firehose" so that people on
all sides can focus on the things they care about.
- There needs to be a much lighter-weight way of seeing an overview
of what's going on (where proposals are in the process and why).
- There is still a legitimate need for "content areas" that capture
artifacts related to projects.
- We need to find a way to scale the process of pushing proposals
through to projects.
- There needs to be much more clarity on what should happen when a
proposal is approved, rejected, ignored, whatever, by the community.
The last one is very important IMHO. I just looked, and there are
currently 15 proposals in the "awaiting resources" state, meaning
that the general idea seems to have met with approval by the developer
community and that now someone needs to actually sign up to _do_ it.
Unfortunately, I have not been approached by anyone about any of
these proposals, except for occasional flame-o-grams demanding to
know why they are not done yet.
Part of this, I'm sure, is that the community of committers is still
fairly small and still getting their bearings. We need to do a better
job of helping developers get actively involved - but we'll never have a
happy community if "awaiting resources" means "awaiting ZC resources".
Ken has written a fair amount on the current fishbowl problems at:
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/FishbowlManageability
How should we go about getting from that + this thread to some
concrete solutions?
Brian Lloyd [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Software Engineer 540.361.1716
Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com
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