[openbeos] Re: Site for non-devs?

I want back and reviewed the list in the FAQ.
It still seems pretty accurate to me. There is no list of "I need this specific 
thing done".
Unless there is something that the devs aren't telling me, they don't really 
have much that they directly need. The bigger issues are more project related.

All right - I have one for you. I need some people to go through the Glass 
Elevator archives and produce a list/report on all of the ideas that have been 
generated there. There are *years* worth of posts. Some ideas are as small as 
one email post. Others are embedded in > 100 messages. Someone has to go 
through all of that and turn it into something that we actually have some hope 
of reviewing when R1 is finished. It could be distributed by thread or by date 
range, if you want to break it up. But it needs to be done or all of the time 
and effort that has gone into GE will be wasted. The devs don't have the time 
or the inclination to spend months post-R1 reading and processing years of 
ideas. OTOH, a small report (10-15 pages) with bullet lists of ideas would be 
great.

I know that BeOSJournal is looking for help. They could use it. Anything that 
helps the community helps us.

While I certainly understand that some people are lazy, lazy volunteers is 
really a contridiction in terms. If you are going to help, it can't be on good 
feelings alone. The sweat of your brow, so to speak, is really what we need. I 
appreciate the good will and nice feelings of the community. But if you want to 
volunteer, you have to be willing to grab ahold of the work and get it done. 
Not that we shouldn't talk first... But be sure that you are really going to do 
what you commit to.

>Totally agree! :)
>
>Being one of those with no coding skills but willing to help, I've 
>yet to find a task where I can be of assistance (they told me the CDT 
>was full, so my "real world" skills will have to go "numb" for a 
>while :) )

I think that we need to look at CDT the same way that we look at all of the 
other teams. Submit patches/changes, not an application. The first 3 or 4 
rounds we had with CDT, we had a lot of people sign up and very little get 
done. It turns out to be a management nightmare. What we need is not a list of 
"interested" people. What we need is completed work. You want to design some 
icons? Fine - go to it. We (OBOS) won't have a whole lot (any?) of wallpaper, 
music, whatever on our distro, as things stand today, so your talents for 
creating these things would probably be better used elsewhere. Our CDT needs, 
honestly, are pretty low right now. We have a new logo and the artwork for the 
new website done. What I might be interested in are mockups for R2 to be posted 
on the GE list. Not themes. Not skins. Stuff that shows a new way of doing 
things. If you have seen Stubear's work, that would be a great example. But 
doing this kind of thing is hard. It requires a lot of indepth think!
 ing. It isn't 10 minutes with a hacked version of Photoshop. In fact, as good 
as Stubear's work looks (and it is stunning), what really excites me about what 
he did is the abundance of replicants. Like Erik said not too long ago - 
component programming is fascinating stuff. The real value of GE is thinking 
about things like that.

So, to tie this up... Other than coding, I don't think that there are a lot of 
very specific examples of things that are critical to the project right now. If 
Axel came out of the basement and posted a completed, working kernel and 
DarkWyrm and Philipe matched that progress, I would guess that we could release 
R1 in very short order. Those are really our bottlenecks right now (this is not 
to criticize any of the above parties, please, those were known to be the 
"hardest parts"). Having said that, there are things that non-coders can do. 
But there is no list. Most of the things that need to be done probably haven't 
been thought of. I still think that the list on the FAQ's is a good indicator 
of the things that I can think of. None of them are specific - they each need a 
real self-starter to jump in and do.

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