Re: Application letter

Hi Jos,

I must to agree with you - a do-it attitude works better than a talk-it
<..>. The BIG question is how significant change it can give?

If a single article can bring 2 new Linux users, we can call it an increase
of 10e9999% (if counted against zero from ML directly). Looking at the big
picture - it's too minor to minor to even discuss about. Various marketing
analysis shows, that it takes ~7-30 adds to convince person to buy the
product. If we want to have a real change and convince someone to "buy" the
ideas/benefits behind FOSS/KDE/Linux, we must ensure we can reach the
necessary scale to do so. Otherwise its just the same trolling on ML's :)

It rises another issue. KDE is mature and still growing community. At the
same time, the management hadn't changed almost at all, and the
communication infrastructure simply fails under such enormous(how many
*_thousands_* contributors KDE has?) loads. It means that we are fast
approaching (if not yet) the tipping point, when it will have to stop
growing (because its hard for new people to join and contribute efficiently
(working alone is never efficient/funny)). While tragedy of the
commons<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>does not
talk about IT, it describes very similar situation - once it
becomes impossible to know each other, the morality/productivity/etc drops
and community fails (imho, some smaller parts still can live separately).

Take a look at e.g. Amarok radio streams plugins, for each country we have a
separate reinvention of wheel. If time used to develop each plugin would
have been to create single solid system, I have no doubt - ShoutCast would
look like a tiny amateur project.

Also, its damn hard to get a team even for the most interesting project (a
simple plasmoid can also be a project), unless you are either senior
developer either have to spend years developing it as a one man project.
Both leads to slower development of KDE, than its potential.

The 20 (wo)men team can attract more webdevs, than 200 writers working
individually :)

Answering your mail about project management software. It was suggested to
the promo people, and in more pilot project like way. I doubt there are
stock tool to fit KDE needs in general, but it doesn't change the fact, that
reworking this area will bring both time saving, and productivity increase.

But that is a bit to deep issue to be solved on ML and I just hope sooner or
later it can be marked as done.

Cheers,

Lukas





>  In general, if you are serious about making a difference, a do-it
> attitude works better than a talk-it. Ideas are cheap - we all have more
> ideas on what to do than time to execute them. If you want to do something
> KDE webdeve related, just start doing it. Maybe others have time to join
> you, maybe not. Brainstorming on the subject brings quite little value -
> while plenty of people will help you brainstorm, few will actually have time
> to contribute anything ;-)
>
>
> I'd recommend to pick a small thing that will obviously bring KDE closer to
> webdevelopers and do it. Writing an article about what KDE has for
> webdevelopers will help more than 100 threads on this ML, for example ;-)
>
>
> The LiveDVD idea is not bad at all, if it gets picked up it might be a nice
> tool. Or - do something for the websites of KDE to get web developers
> involved. Anyway, as I said - ideas are cheap, we've got plenty :D
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jos
>

 
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