[Incubator] Infrastructure Migration

[Jo Walsh]

dear Jody, all,
On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 02:49:00PM -0700, Jody Garnett wrote:
> >pretty dry discussion.
> No worries, just explaining why it has been dry (most of us are into 
> hacking code it seems).

Okay, let's try the up-spin on this, and look at it as an
"infrastructure of engagement" which any "architecture of participation" 
needs to have in place. Look at it as cross-project collaboration tools,
documentation tools, rather than hacker tools (which are well refined,
in all sorts of places, easy enough to get 'right'); refining what
OSGeo provides to bootstrap more example-driven user outreach projects.

Markus has talked especially about translation infrastructure - 
lowering the barrier to contributions via web frontends to svn for .po 
files, etc. Right now you (geotools/*) have kicking developer documentation 
written by hackers. You're concerned about user documentation and how it will 
happen - because it's not *necessary* to expand the development process -  
hard to set milestones for. So start making it easier for users to
write it, expand it, make it more self-managing. When i am learning
new things I quite like to write down horror stories of what I found out 
and the mis-tracks i took, and put them on the web. 

I have an old keyphrase from Chris's blog rattling round my mind
keeping me awake: "In order to become the foundation of participation
that i envision, the tools to support it should be in place".

I don't want to offer the moon on a stick. But i realise that right
now the infrastructure chatter only seems to be offering a stick...
Don't concentrate on the stick, or you will miss all the heavenly glory.

> (Now if only we could talk about branding, which is an obligation)

You are *wanting* to talk about branding? Perhaps this could be taken
outside... : http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/OSGeo_Project_Branding

Thanks again for the responses,


jo