[Qgis-developer] about building FOSS community

[Martin Dobias]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> Martin Dobias ha scritto:
>> Here's a post by Aaron Seigo from KDE about building the community.
>> He's giving advices on how to make the community around the project
>> grow.
>> It's a good reading :-)
>
> Very interesting read indeed.
> How far you devs feel QGIS is from this ideal?

What I have identified what could be improved:
- documentation of design - there is automatically generated
documentation for API, however the high-level image ("architecture")
is not well documented (although it's relatively easy to understand)
- cookbook - we should prepare a series of "how do I" code snippets
for many common actions. This is much simpler way to get known to API
than studying the docs. I've started with some snippets on wiki, but
they're still missing much stuff:
http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/PythonBindings
- "have a menu" - there's no feature plan for further releases - of
course it's impossible to create a plan like in commercial project,
but a good plan with direction where we're going would help - users
would know what they can expect and developers have more unified look
on the future
- blogging - IMHO blogging more on qgis blog would help to keep
project visible and let the users know it's active - new features, new
plugin in repository, fixed bugs, usage of qgis for something, useful
hints, rants, basically anything. (there might be someone aggregating
interesting stuff from qgis mailing lists ???)

But generally I have the impression that the developer and user
community is open, helpful and having fun building this masterpiece
:-)


Martin