[sword-devel] Discussion ideas

[Martin Gruner]

> I am writing because as a volunteer here I feel a bit confused about the
> direction of the Sword project. It has been mentioned by myself and others
> here that topics, and ideas seem to be talked about and then they seem to
> die off in nowhere land with seemingly no decision being made in the end.
> Perhaps the inner core developers are making decisions about these things
> internally.
>
> I sometimes wonder what the current goals are for the Sword project, the
> Win32 front-end and the web site. It would be nice if all decision making
> topics ended with some kind of summary of the things discussed and then the
> final decision made or if it undecided further discussion. If a final
> decision is made it makes it onto a to-do list or milestone chart of some
> type.

I agree.

> It would also be nice to see a to-do list and milestone list for each of
> the projects, and approximate dates of completion for each so that we can
> see progress and get excited about our progress.

Yes. That's what sourceforge is for. Try 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bibletime to get an idea of how much 
sourceforge has pushed the development of bibletime.

> As it stands now I have seen a lot of good ideas and discussions disappear
> in a short time. At least with a newsgroup the topics are all archived and
> new comers can read the history of those threads that they are interested
> in. We can also see quickly the threads that may have been overlooked or
> prematurely died and help to continue the decision making process. If not a
> newsgroup at least some type of webpage that archives the discussions. See
> http://lists.suse.com/archives/suse-linux-e/ for an example.

I'd personally prefer mailing lists. There are sites like "the mail archive" 
that you can subscribe a mailinglist to, and they will record all the 
messages and have tools for (re)seraching etc.

> Please understand this is my first time dealing with an open source project
> or being part of a development team at all, so my ideas may not be
> realistic, but at least tell me why. Let's reason this topic together, and
> lets make a decision to help keep communication flowing.
>
> Most importantly let's pray that God will help us communicate more clearly
> and that He would give us a vision and direction in all of the projects
> Sword is involved in. Thank you for your patience with me as I vent both my
> frustrations and hopes to you all.

Thank you for your openness. Your epressed the feelings I have towards the 
SWORD project too.
At the moment we have a kinda funny situation. There are volunteers (from 
sourceforge ad) who want to help with the coding in the core lib. (!)
But they don't really have a good possibility, because we don't really know 
who is working on what, what the near and far aims are. There should be 
someone who really manages the development of sword. This would involve 
giving direction & assigning tasks as well as gathering volunteers and 
guiding them on their way.
You know, watching the development of KDE I got very convinced of the 
OpenSource paradigm. It will be even stronger in this area. So many people 
are interested in good free bible study software. And there are many people 
who are able and willing to help. We have the resources. We have the 
opportunities. Sword can become a serious competitor to the commercial tools. 
But to achieve this there has to be a change!

Martin