[OSGeo-Board] Re: OSGeo-Board Local Chapters, Translation, etc
Chris Holmes
cholmes at openplans.org
Wed Feb 15 11:41:44 PST 2006
Chris
Gary Lang wrote:
> Arnulf,
>
> We all like the Wiki. I think we as a group need to understand exactly
> what you are saying in your other email about motion and visibility -
> every link to the site adds to it and the foundation's' brand equity,
> which impacts a number of things, not the least of which is how much
> money we will raise.
>
> So putting more of the social aspects of the foundation on another site
> is counterproductive to this. For the exact reasons you cite below, I
> suggest we use the Wiki for collaborative document editing but keep
> conversations in mailing lists that get archived and indexed on the
> osgeo site. Otherwise the value of the site is greatly diminished.
I don't think I agree with the value of the foundation being greatly
diminished by being spread across several sites. With
GeoServer/GeoTools it's actually a boon, as we get the best of breed
tools: confluence and jira on codehaus for bug tracking and wiki, svn on
refractions, as they are constantly working on the same projects and
keep it up better than others, downloads from sourceforge, as their
mirroring is unrivaled, and email lists on sourceforge, as there's no
good reason to move, and keeping it there ensures the archives all stay
in the same place.
The only real benefits I've heard of all projects being on the same
infrastructure is 'search', and common look and feel. I personally
never use the search facilities on sites, let google or someone else do
the indexing, and you can even isolate your search to just a few sites...
As for look and feel, I personally see little need to get all the
software projects on the exact same infrastructure, things are
functioning great, and I don't think that the 'value added' is
necessarily worth the cost (social and technical) of moving the
infrastructure. I think a _lot_ on the look and feel can be
accomplished with the main site having home pages for each of the
projects, with all the links to docs, trackers, forums, lists, ect. in a
single look and feel. And a common way of explaining what the project
does and all. A very nice outward appearance. But I don't think that
needs to extend to how the project actually operates... The links can
go out to a variety of different infrastructures. The collabnet option
should be there for any project that wants to take advantage of it, but
should not be forced. The costs of changing infrastructures can be
high, especially changing from like a bug tracker that you know works
well with your community to one that might be lacking a few key features.
That said, I would like the foundation to eventually host most all the
infrastructure that projects do like. I can probably volunteer the open
planning project to host a confluence and jira which we can customize to
have the same css and logos as the main site. If we put it under the
same domain it _is_ the same as the rest of osgeo. If I want to search
for bugs for GeoServer, I'll go to the search engine for it. Saving two
seconds of time by searching from the main collabnet search is not worth
it to me.
This all said, I like email lists better than wikis for conversations,
and feel that lists should be the primary mode of communication. I
would really like to see collabnet have the ability to let users
interact with email lists as forums, but we can just point people at
http://nabble.com ...
>
> I can tell we're not super-thrilled with the technical aspects of the CN
> architecture and some other things, but it works and it's paid for. If
> we have nothing but announcements on it, and discussions all over the
> place, the foundation's site loses its focus and value. Otherwise our
> visibility will be diffused, as per your other email.
>
> Motion: I propose that the FOSS Wiki be the document editing environment
> of choice but that we stick with the lists and the CN infrastructure for
> other social activities, otherwise, the foundation won't have a focus.
I disagree that the foundation 'loses its focus and value' if we're not
on the CN infrastructure. I think the CN is great for setting up _new_
projects and email lists, and pretty good for some of the social
activities. But to me the value added of having everything on the same
tool is really not worth all that much (and indeed it scares me a bit
when on a proprietary tool). We can have a very nice, outward facing
site, with good links in to where all the discussions live. It just
needs some thought on execution, which should be easier than migrating
tons of existing infrastructure over. Having the homepages all on CN
makes a ton of sense, especially doing things like having mapbender.org
or gdal.org point straight to the foundation.
And if we really want to make this foundation based on participation, we
should choose the best tools to enable that participation. Yes, we need
to have a really nice outward facing site, but we also need a really
good technical infrastructure to allow the non-coding energy to do
interesting stuff.
Perhaps we could make osgeo.org more outward facing, and osgeo.net
focused ideas and building them?
Sorry to harp on this, but I feel it's really important. And I think we
can have both a really nice outward facing site and a really nice
internal infrastructure that does not need to be built completely on
collabnet. They do not have to be the same thing, and while I think
collabnet does a nice job on the former, for the latter we need more
tools integrated than they currently offer. And having the best tools
is of utmost importance for really attracting lots of participants, so
that their first interaction of contributing is positive, and that
greater participation takes the same additional amount of learning.
Forcing non-programmers to use SVN just to contribute to the website is
way too much, imho. And I think non-programmers are going to be our
most valuable resource in really building this foundation.
What would be great is if there was a wiki button to export an html
version to the collabnet svn. Could even do it with every insert, and
get the nice interaction of wiki on top of the same infrastructure...
best regards,
Chris
>
> BTW I said FOSS and didn't think of Frank Zappa. After a day at the OSBC
> where this term was widely used (it was not a year ago BTW), I guess I'm
> getting used to it!
>
> Gary
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arnulf Christl (CCGIS) [mailto:arnulf.christl at ccgis.de]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 6:12 AM
> To: board at board.osgeo.org
> Subject: [OSGeo-Board] Re: OSGeo-Board Local Chapters, Translation, etc
>
>
>
>>Folks,
>>
>>What do you think of starting a mailing list for those interested in
>>translation of foundation pages (ie. PR), setting up local sites (ie.
>>Toru), or establishing connections with regional organizations (ie.
>>FOSSGIS, Geolivre, etc)?
>>
>>I am thinking of something like international-discuss at board.osgeo.org.
>
>
> Doing this is cool, but why not in the Wiki? I am really swamped with
> emails already and I don't need yet another one. The ColabNet
> infrastructure will spawn email lists like hell anyway. In most of our
> work groups we have managed to reduce use of emails to manage
> catastrophies. Everything else is done way better in the Wiki. Please
> just have a look at this simple diagram again:
> http://www.socialtext.com/images/email-vs-socialtext-20050320.gif
>
>
> It helps. Really!
>
>
>>I am seeing alot of interest in setting addressing the international
>>outreach issue. However, I don't think we as a board can do this
>
> topic
>
>>justice in the near term with everything else going on. What I would
>>like is to have a venue where folks interested in this area could
>>discuss and do some planning, perhaps coming back to the board with
>>recommendations.
>>
>>Addressing questions like:
>> o Organizing translation of foundation pages.
>> o Addressing local "chapters" or resources (ie. ja.osgeo.org?)
>> o Addressing what sort of affiliation or outreach to regional
>>organizations
>> makes sense.
>> o Raising issues with the internationalization support in foundation
>> software projects.
>>
>>If we want to do this we could either designated it properly as a
>>"committee"
>>or just set it up as a mailing list with no special designation. If
>>we establish it as a proper committee I think we would need to provide
>
>
>>it with some sort of mandate and it would be expected to come up with
>>somewhat formal recommendations to the board.
>>
>>If you guys are supportive, I'll write up a motion in the wiki based
>>on the above, and similar to web masters group.
>
>
> Cool, do that. And wrap it in square brackets and make each one a link
> to a separate page. No need for initializing mailing lists. If they are
> neede we can still set them up.
>
> Arnulf.
>
>
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--
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
thoughts at: http://cholmes.wordpress.com
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