Re: About the project

Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab-S0/[email protected]> Sat, 06 Aug 2016 18:18:30 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.network.freenet.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Ian Clarke writes:

> On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 9:22 AM, Florent Daigniere [email protected]
>  wrote:
>
>> The project is in terrible shape due to the lack of leadership, and
>> most of it boils down to the fact that you're just not around (I'm sure
>> you're busy with other things).
>
> It is certainly true that I'm preoccupied with other things (namely making
> a living - an unfortunate necessity for most people).  Should someone else
> come along with the time, motivation, and expertise to take over as
> coordinator, I would welcome it.  No such person has come forward.

For the past 2 years, except for money allocation, that person has been
Steve. He merges pull requests and all volunteers respect his decisions
on merging. For the volunteer work we’re not missing leadership.

> That seems self-contradictory to me - you just recommended having a
> roadmap, and yet now you seem to be arguing that a volunteer-run project
> can't have a roadmap because nobody can be compelled to do anything they
> don't want to do.

A common roadmap people can stand behind does not contradict power being
in the hands of do-ers. It helps seeing how all the tasks people care
about fit together to form a larger whole.

And if it shows 

> Because I noticed that a solid "core" of Freenet developers seemed very
> resentful of me getting involved in the project again

I was very happy when you started to get involved again.

I wasn’t happy when you started attacking people on a personal level
when they disagreed with what you proposed.

I wasn’t happy when you stated the path forward without knowing the
current state or requirements of our userbase.

> I would say the goal is two-fold:
>
> a) Get Freenet to the point that it is easy to use, comparable to
> contemporary software-projects in terms of UI design, marketing etc.
>
> b) Ensure that Freenet achieves its goal of ensuring true freedom of
> communication (which means it needs to be secure, etc)

(b) includes (a), because to be provide true freedom of communication
Freenet also needs to be widespread.

> If I wanted to be autocratic I'd immediately allocate $5k to get
> professional designers to redesign the website from the ground-up, however
> I have a strong feeling that would be met by howls of protest by those who
> (for reasons that make no sense to me) think the website is just fine the
> way it is.

If you would propose that, from me you’d get the answer that I’d be OK
with that (as I already said a few months ago — a year ago I called for
an embargo, not for sticking with the site forever) as long as

a) that new site works when uploaded into Freenet and
b) it preserves all inbound links and
c) is actually finished, so it does not require us volunteers to spend
   half a year of work to make it actually work (like re-translating
   everything, re-integrating the infrastructure to deploy it, etc).

However I would much prefer if your proposal would not be to task a
designer with redesigning it "from the ground up", but with "making the
Freenet site rock" and leaving it to the designer whether to break
everything (and invest the work to integrate everything) or to just
create a better theme and restructure existing content.

But I’m not calling for you to be autocratic. If you propose stuff which
obviously makes sense to most Freenet devs, and adjust that to take into
account constructive criticism (like taking into account requirements
you did not think about) then you can be confident that it will be
accepted by most people here, including me.

Best wishes,
Arne

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