Hi Waldemar,
This is Koki, the nagger. :-)
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Koki