OpenEuphoria

RE: Moving on...

• Posted by Peter Willems <peter at integratedmoves.com> Aug 14, 2003
• 549 views

Matt Lewis wrote:

> From: Peter Willems
> > Al Getz wrote:
> > > It's true that development goes faster when there is more
> > > then one person working on something, but the thing is,
> > > does everyone really want to work on the same exact project?
> > 
> >    I think that other projects are showing that it can work this
> >    way. I do think that more people would like to participate IF
> >    they actually knew that they could. I think that some form of
> >    project management (through a community site) would help much
> >    to attract participants in the first place.
> 
> I think it's important to remember that a 'project team' isn't 
> synonymous
> with 'coders' (I know that Peter and Derek are posting with this in 
> mind).

   Actually, what I had in mind is that a community website with
   dedicated forums, wiki, etc, might invite many "non-coders" to
   participate in other ways as well. For example, discussion about
   a needed feature is already "participation" in my book. I also
   know that many coders measure the interest in their "product" by
   the amount of input they get from users.

> Even simple help with documentation can dramatically raise the quality 
> of a
> project.  I strongly recommend using the makedoc utility that comes with
> Win32Lib (I've made a lot of modifications to my copy).  It makes the
> process a lot less painful.  Since I've started using it religiously, I
> think my documentation has seen huge improvements (I'd rate most of it 
> at
> poor to fair now :).  One thing that's always a turnoff to me is a short
> readme.txt file saying to look at the comments in the file to see how
> everything works.  Please use some sort of doc generator (like the
> above-mentioned makedoc.exw) that pulls those comments out into an HTML 
> file
> or something.  The easier and more user friendly your projects, the 
> better
> they'll be received.  It's always worth delaying a day to release if you
> spend the time documenting everything.  Plus testers and demo writers 
> are a
> lot of help.

   I would even recommend raising such documentation and a specific
   doc-generator as a must for the projects that are hosted on such
   a community website 

> One problem, as Al alludes, is that many projects cover a fairly narrow
> spectrum of interest.  There may be only 2 or 3 people even remotely
> interested in a project in the Euphoria community.

   From my pov the community website should primarilly focus on
   building the most needed libraries up to a stable version.
   Starting other projects based on the community simply needs
   enough participants (but I would say that three people is enough
   to get something going on a usable scale).

> Unless its something you
> feel very passionate about, without interest and feedback from others, 
> you
> *will* lose interest in any project.  This often leads others to believe
> that the project is dead.  They don't inquire about it, seeing that it's
> very incomplete and inactive, and so the developer never regains 
> interest in
> it.  It's a chicken and the egg scenario in some respects.

   But if the project is hosted on a community website then the
   developer can easy request feedback or ask if anyone else want
   to participate or even take over the project. This is common 
   practice in other developer communities.
 
> > > Usually this isnt the case unless there is some concrete
> > > reward, even if it's small.  Most people i think do what they
> > > do because they really want to do it, not because they are
> > > getting paid 
> > 
> >    Agreed. But I'm sure there are more people that would like
> >    to help, just for the fun of it.
> 
> We actually have a reward system.  No one's going to get rich off the
> MicroEconomy, but it's a great way to recognize the efforts of others, 
> not
> to mention encourage them.  Personally, I feel it to be a responsibility 
> to
> put my votes in (just like voting in real elections).  I don't always 
> vote
> for things that I actually have a use for, but often for projects that 
> seem
> interesting to me for one reason or another.  I hope that the votes help
> motivate the authors to continue to develop.

   I actually think that the reward system is nice but not usable
   on a community driven website. The main goal of a community is
   to "drive" that community 
   We need a community that will drive the development based on
   creating/developing BETTER tools (like libraries) for the
   community. 

Hans Peter Willems