Re: [udig-devel] udig and community

[andrea antonello <andrea.antonello@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jody and all who answered the call.

> Hi Andrea - I have had this email open all week trying to sort out how to
> reply to it. While I have added some comments inline - let me first state
> that I really enjoy working with everyone and will do everything I can to
> help.

The same for me here. I have difficulties to approach that matter,
since I am often told to be too direct. Anyway I still think it is the
best way.
That is why I say that I hoped to get at least some feedback from all
the members of the PSC, or at least from the companies that are
behind.
What is the purpose of a PSC? Writing redundant email every week with
an update?
I do not subscribe to that. Instead I think the PSC should take care
of particular situations, in which the community needs to see that
there is a common leadership.

>> This something I can't find in the udig community and lately I am
>> wondering if I am the only one seeing it like that.
>
> I understand the perspective; it is very difficult to encourage the
> development of a stable product when it is funded by a bunch of small
> contracts. It leaves a lot of the product stories to be accounted for by us
> the community; drawing on the resources and improvements made (as people add
> new functionality like WMS-C support or caching WFS support).
> I was very happy with the sense of community shown during the code sprint;
> part of why that was successful was that those of us working in a consulting
> organization could warn our bosses that we were going to do some open source
> work for a specific amount of time.

I understand that. And I don't want to force people to do this or
that. I lately think that something has to be done to push uDig
properly. I propose activities. I expect at least from some of you to
answer me things like: great! or go to hell! no time. or my company
now doesn't want to know anything about uDig.
Again, I honestly find the PSC update quite useless if then there is no dialog.

>> I would like to start a discussion here to understand who would
>> be interested to plan a set of meetings in which this is a handled. Call it
>> code sprint, call it whatever you want.
>
> I would be interested; and if done as a set of meetings it will be much
> easier to organize participation all around.

Great, I will be available to help organizing and breaking balls :)

>> I am willing to partecipate and be present, but as I already
>> mentioned several times we need the partecipation of developers that
>> designed that code, since without them it will take hell of a time for
>> the others to proceed.
>
> Got it; understood and I will be there.

Great. thanks. Your contribution will be almost mandatory :)

>> I am interested in a well working udig first of all. A udig in which a fix
>> made doesn't break other 5 things and is released without testing. A udig,
>> in which we try redistribute the JIRA tasks bejond people interested and in
>> which a Jody can blame (== remind) me for not having
>> fixed the bug in the time I said I would.
>
> The handling of Jira is a good topic for a seperate email; we should
> probably have a bug cull (evaulate patches; accept or deny feature requests
> and so on). I would like to try and use Jira more formally to set a road
> map.

Yes, let's do that. Open that pandora box together and see what comes out.

>> -meet to do a cleanup of JIRA, redistribution of bugs on active/willing
>> developers
>>
>> -better define a roadmap. The plugin system is great but also a suicide
>> bomb in an anarchy.
>> -meet to do some bugfixing together (so newer developers can be assisted
>> be senior udig developers)
>> -ony after that do some new features code sprint. I know fun is the most
>> welcome, but first things first
>
> Okay that sounds clear and responsible; and productive.

Glad to hear that.

>> With this I am not criticizing anyone or anything, I hope that is clear.
>> It is a comment about how I see a sane community. Udig has infinite
>> potential but is in a transition phase. Why in
>> almost every presentation I do about JGrass they ask me why I
>> didn't migrate into QGis or Gvsig or even Jump?!? I have no problem to
>> answer that question, since I am still 100% sure I did the right thing,
>> but it hurts to hear that Udigis still not in the mouth of everyone. :)
>
> Speaking of which I would like to see either 1) udig/jgrass workshop at 3
> hours or a udig tutorial and a jgrass tutorial at foss4g 2009. The deadline
> is on monday!

We wrote one:
"A pragmatic approach to climate change - the JGrass/uDig rope team"

What about that? :)
The deadline has changed, that will give us more time to better
organize each other. Jody, it would be great if we could have that
workshop together, if it is accepted.


Andrea