[technology-pmc] Babel Project review

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Babel Project members

I've done a quick review of your project. In general, it seems as though 
the project is progressing well. I am happy with the level of community 
involvement. My own experience shows that there is a lot of buzz around 
this project; you are clearly doing good things.

I'd like to see the project summary page cleaned up with a better, more 
concise, description. Further, I'd like to see an up-to-date plan, and a 
 release scheduled.

Here are some specifics:

The description on the project summary page renders poorly. I believe 
that the project's landing page is being used for the description. It 
would be better if you could make an actual separate file that contains 
only the description of the project.

The newsgroup has steady (though relatively low) volume. Similarly, the 
babel-translator mailing list, which seems to be focused at a similar 
audience, also has steady volume. It does seem that most questions are 
getting answered in a timely manner and, judging by the length of some 
of the exchanges, a healthy (albeit relatively small) community seems to 
be developing.

Information to help would-be contributors set up a development 
environment is under the "Contributors" tab which may seem reasonable 
enough; however, the grayed out "Getting Started" tab was initially 
off-putting and led me to believe that this documentation was just not 
available. It'd be nice to see Team Project Sets/Buckminster 
scripts/whatever for setting up the workspace.

There are 283 Bugs against Babel in the system. There appears to be a 
lot of diversity in the reporters, which again is a good indicator of 
healthy community development.

The babel-dev list suggests a high-level of interactivity between 
project members. This is good stuff.

Committer activity in CVS appears to be slowing. There are 99 bugs open 
against Babel which seems to indicate that there is still work to do.
Does this indicate that a release is pending?

There are no releases indicated on the project summary page. The project 
plan seems out of date, listing an "M0" release in January 2008. There 
are no other dates indicated in the plan. The plan needs to be updated 
and a release scheduled. It'd be nice to see the plan in the standard form.

Only one project mentor is indicated in the project summary. Is there a 
second mentor?

Thanks,

Wayne