Re: PMC 2009: Platform for Ticket

Banzai wrote:

> When I see lots of activities in mt, I feel energized and excited. But 
> when there's very little activity in mt (ie monotone repo) I get 
> discourage and feel Xaraya is stagnant/slowly dyeing. Marketing, 
> branding, etc etc without much activity in the coding/dev area do not 
> give me the confidence of Xarayas' survivality.
> 
> Therefore, what I would like to see is serious effort and focus on 
> increasing activity momentum in mt. Maybe the PMC 2009 can set an 
> example and increase coding/dev momentum.
> 
> Heartiest appreciation to Xar devs (core/unstable/modules/themes) who 
> are COUNTINOUSLY & actively involved in mt repo eg jojodee, hb, 
> jasonjudge, christ, marcel, dracos etc
> 
> Banzai

The fact that we have spikes in repository activity rather than a 
constant level is a sign of a project that isn't thriving.  There's also 
probably some metric comparing number of lines of code to number of 
contributors (which I will research if anyone is interested), but I 
doubt our many thousands of lines to a dozen or so current contributors 
is a healthy ratio.

I'll be excited when we put out a release and our SourceForge downloads 
for that month spike to more than 15000 (last release spike was around 
4000 I think), and we maintain constant monthly downloads of more than 
2000 instead of the trickle of 400 per month.

This will mean that we have not only increased our repository activity, 
but also made ourselves known to more users, some who hopefully 
contribute back, and a few become active community members.  That 
#support will be occupied with more strangers seeking help than people 
we know offering it, and that our mail lists have more activity than us 
quibbling over details.

Based on some models I developed a while ago, we should be able to 
recruit 2-3 new developers per 10000 downloads.  I also calculated that 
we have at most 10% of the community size and user base of Drupal or 
Joomla, yet we have similar amounts of code.

But we'll never reach goals like that while the functioning of the 
project rests on the shoulders of only a few.  How we have handled 
project management in the past hasn't worked, so we owe it to ourselves 
and each other to try something new.  I'd like to take an approach that 
isn't so code-oriented that every other area (user support, mindshare, 
documentation, presentation, recruitment, and others) suffers or is 
ignored altogether.

There is more to a project than writing code, and there is more to 
participating in a project than an occasional mail list posting.  For 
the foreseeable future, the PMC will need to take part in non-managerial 
activities until other people ask for tasks to be delegated to them. 
Who will step up?

That rallying cry probably sucked, but I'm not good at them anyway.