[openbeos] Re: BugZilla => Trac

Hi Waldemar,

This is Koki, the nagger. :-)

Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
On 8/25/06, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
I am not referring to Trac specifically, but to the new website project
as a whole (from several months ago). It leaves a very bad taste and a
strong sense of unilateralism when somebody from the outside tries to
help on an open mailing list, his opinions are shot down, and then a few
privileged decide behind doors to do what this person had proposed in
the first place.


Actually, you sounded more like someone nagging (sorry). You had no
real suggestions for *what* to do except posting a "help needed" forum
item. It didn't really help. I already said it at that time and I'll
repeat it:
In most cases, people *seriously* wanting to help join without us
explicitly asking them for help. Michael mentioned this many times,
too. He doesn't believe in this "shout out for help and you get 10
volunteers" and I must agree. The only things we can do are:
* point out which tasks need to be done (including non-developer)
* make it easy to get started
That requires articles on our website and a page which lists
non-developer one-time contribution TODOs (if we have any).

I was not nagging. I made some very specific suggestions back then, but they fell into deaf ears. Haiku turned out to adopt something along the lines of what I proposed, which made it quite puzzling. But I will not nag you anymore on that. :-)

Reality has confirmed that the idea that people will come to your door and offer to help is quite unrealistic. For people to become motivated, there has to be certain conviction. The way we communicate our ideas and interact with those who approach the project in an attempt to eventually contribute does not inspire that conviction.

It is not that people do not want to help or are lazy; there is something that Haiku is doing wrong that we do not inspire (more) people to help. In volunteer-based projects, motivation is everything, and motivation is inspired, not forced upon. :-)

admins discussed or voted on something (behind doors), it does not make
it legitimate in the eyes of the people looking from outside.

Haiku seems to have a very inward centered view of things. Because the

Okay, I'm sorry that I'm pushing so hard and that it might look to
some people that this is my personal project and I'm not working with
anyone else on improving the website. I'm always open for real and
concrete suggestions.

I don't have much time left. I must start concentrating on my studies.
If I had asked everyone before changing something on the website we
would still be sitting here with our old website and ugly BugZilla.
I tried it that way (talk, talk), but it is extremely frustrating that
you have to wait many hours for an email reply and discuss everything
to death before every step you want to take. It just takes too long.
This might work much better in a company where I can meet people
face-to-face and everyone can spend as much time on the project as I
do, but even then I just can't ask everyone because I would *never*
get finished with anything.

Having to discuss things, and interacting with others is the nature of a community project like Haiku (as opposed to an individual's project). It does take long(er), but there is nothing you can do about it. Another characteristic of open source projects is that most communication is done electronically; we would all love to be able to talk face-to-face, but that is not possible, so we live with it.

This whole email conversation is pointless. I'm well aware of my
mistakes, but I can't do anything about it apart from passing the
whole work to someone else who has enough time to wait until
everything is perfect.

First, no conversation is pointless; that is exactly the attitude that puts people off.

Second, my posts were not meant to nail you for your mistakes; they were meant to raise awareness that we are all in this together, and that there needs to be teamwork.

You don't have to take an "I do it or you do it" or and "all or nothing" approach. Others are already starting to contribute (Petter is already working on a nice theme); so perhaps you could offload some of the burden, and still oversee the project (time permitting, that is). You do not have to put the whole weight of the website on your shoulders. :-)

gotta change. I will propose to the admins that we publish at least a
summary of the topics discussed and the decisions made on the weekly
admin meetings.

That is not my idea of openness or collaboration, and something has

This would be nice, but who has the time to do it?
Sikosis started mentioning internal information in his podcast. Maybe
it can be extended some more?

As mentioned in my reply to Axel, this should not be much of a burden, and I think it is doable. I will propose to discuss it at the next admin meeting.

I did not say Waldemar was sloppy; I said that his rushing of the
transition makes the project look sloppy. You seem to take it lightly
that he decided to make the switch to Trac without announcing or even
consulting it with anyone else (that's the unilateralism and lack of
collaboration), but I don't, because I think it does make us look sloppy
and disorganized.


The reason for this quick switch to Trac was that I won't have time to
do the whole migration again when I work on my studies. Someone else
will have to do it. As you can see the last migration I worked out
quite well, so I don't see any reason to do it again and waste even
more time. If someone has a problem with it then I'd be happy to pass
all my work to him and start with my studies. Actually, it would be
nice if someone else could take most of the responsibility for the
website when I concentrate on real-life issues.

As it turns out, Charlie has experience with migrating Track; if there was a bit more of communication, he could have helped or taken over the transition of Trac, and you would have not been under pressure. :-)

The existing website is VERY classy, and it is easy to navigate. The new
website may have more content that is more up-to-date, but it's design
is subpar, and the content is quite disorganized, so it is difficult to
find stuff.


Could you please give me specific examples of the new website being
too hard to navigate?
Maybe the problem is that I prepared the website for *huge* amounts of
content (unlike the old site). You should use the search and tag
functions to find information. Of course, we should still hard-link to
the most important articles. The new website is a little experiment. I
want to get rid of tree based navigation and static organization and I
want to see how well it works out when we have large amounts of
content.

I'm probably one of the worst designers in the world. That's why I
shouted out for help. Unfortunately, the response was ... silence.

I will put all the specifics in a separate email. Given the circumstances, I am putting off the conceptual proposal (that I had started working on, but that would take a long time to implement), and I try to on getting the site ready for rollout as soon as possible.

Koki


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