[sword-devel] Re: Volunteer and Project Management

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Jonathan and others,
	Thanks again for your commitment and involvement with the project...


>     Hey, how are you doing? I hope everything is ok, I have not seen you
> post things on the developers mailinglist in a long time, hope you are just
> taking a well deserved vacation!

:)  Well, not exactly.  I've been designing and leading the group
developing the XML repository for GE and the first project to use the
repository went online this week (3 months before our production
deadline, which means we're feveroushly trying to optimize and debug
code that we thought we'd have another few months to work on).  My
apologies for keeping up with sword.


> I would like to ask you two things, about
> organizing volunteers and the overall project management:
> 
> 1. I am the kind of person that respects authority greatly and will not do
> anything that undermines someone else's authority or areas under their
> authority, so I would like to ask if it is ok with you that I do somethings
> to organize volunteers and the overall project management, including
> figuring out exactly what needs to be done, getting people to do some task
> lists, documentation, and managing the volunteers and where they are
> working, etc. This will all be of course with the advice and contribution of
> the developers on the developers mailinglist, and you. But I see this needed
> to sorely be done.

I agree that we need some organization.  Typically, though, there is
someone who really has a desire to work on a particular area of the
project (e.g. modules -Chris; KDE frontend -Joachim; Copyright stuff
-you!; GNOME frontend- Terry; and so many others) and they lead their
individual efforts.  Maybe a bulletin board type of website for
volunteers to go, where they might see who's doing what and who needs
help...  What do you think?  I could help with a set of JSPs that write
to our server's database where project leads could post project status
and direction, or even actual tasks.


> 2. Is it possible to setup a mailinglist to communicate and collaborate on
> the new website design for Sword? I know you had concerns that you want the
> website to be something that you are comfortable with the layout, design,
> and the ability for someone to maintain it when the person doing it now has
> to move on. I feel the best way to do this is setting up a mailinglist where
> everyone can chat about it and start working out some of the details and
> start coding the site all together as a community, including your input and
> advice. This is apposed to people spending all the time to make an example
> only for it to be rejected, or nothing done with it (as is what is happening
> now), we need to develop it as a community. I have contacted the webmaster
> of www.kde.org and asked him for some advice about redesigning an open
> source projects website. I can share with you these ideas if you would like?

What do you and everyone think about using our news server for this
list?  We had thought about moving the mailing list over to a news
server sometime back, and had mixed sentiments.  It would give us a
great test to see how people like the news server paradigm.  Thoughts?