Re: Communications in Projects...

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Jim Gettys wrote:

> I promised to draft this last summer: I did, but did not see a good
> opportunity to send it when people were listening (the battles of
> last summer had died down by the time I drafted this), and then was out for
> surgery.  So here are some thoughts, I hope we can have a useful discussion.

Thanks Jim.

> 	o if you work on a library or component others depend on, you have
> 	a responsibility that increases with your success to gather input,
> 	get feedback, communicate plans, etc.  This is particularly critical whenever
> 	incompatible changes are needed/planned, as this generates work for others,
> 	and their buy in is essentially required for your (and the project's)
> 	success.  Projects can live or die on their ability to handle change.


To echo Jim a bit here...

The Board spent a good chunk of time one day brainstorming how GNOME can
get past its growing pains of becoming a very large and complex
organization where informal communication starts to not scale well.  The
one main point which we all seemed to agree on was that, especially for
core GNOME libraries and projects, it is important that the maintainers
recognize their responsibility to be the voice for their project.  Lots of
developers of other parts of GNOME rely on these maintainers keeping them
posted of changes, development status, significant design decisions, etc.

We decided that an initial format for this would be to ask the project and
module maintainers to write up periodic reports.  Approximately monthly
seems appropriate.  The reports could be either included in the GNOME
Status Report or linked from the GNOME Status Report to the location of
the document/email on the web.

I'd like to thank Jeff Waugh for recently and independently coming up with
this idea and offering to help Christian and Steve gather reports.

I'd also like to strongly urge maintainers of core GNOME modules and
projects to periodically post brief status reports so the broader GNOME
developer community can keep track of the progress and evolution of the
GNOME platform without following an unwieldy number of mailing lists.

Dan