[geeklog-devel] Random notes and thoughts from FOSDEM

[Dirk Haun]

Seeing that I have a busy second half of the week ahead, I thought I'd  
rather post a random list of thoughts than wait until later, when I've  
forgotten most of it already ...

1) Open Advice, http://open-advice.org/
If you haven't heard about it yet: Go there, download it, start  
reading. Lydia Pintscher (of KDE) put together a collection of short  
articles from all sorts of people involved in open source. The  
subtitle "What we wish we had known when we started" about sums it up.  
Useful insights and advice, not only in the lights of the upcoming  
GSoC but for open source contribution in general.

2) I had the pleasure of meeting Rouslan (Hi!). We only had time for a  
short chat since I had to run and catch my train, but it's always nice  
to meet the people behind the avatar (with or without wigs ;-) A few  
things I remember:
- Homepage redesign, especially a new theme. We really need to do  
this. We need a nice theme and we need to unclutter the homepage. We  
should probably throw some of our money towards a new theme (any ideas  
how to best approach this? and any takers for someone taking care of  
that process?)
- Unused patches and GSoC projects. We have so many patches and  
almost-finished GSoC projects sitting around and rotting, it's really  
embarrassing. To make it easier for people to contribute, Rouslan  
suggested to use Bitbucket (a service pretty much like GitHub, but  
using Mercurial instead of Git). Okay, let's try this. I've cloned the  
Geeklog repository here:

   https://bitbucket.org/geeklog/

My own account is here: https://bitbucket.org/dhaun/

I'll try and keep our own and the Bitbucket repositories in sync  
(maybe there's a way to automate this - have to check). If you have a  
patch that you want to contribute, please feel free to try out this  
route and send a pull request.

Hmm, what else? I'm sure I've forgotten something. Rouslan?

3) Bounties ... I've attended a few sessions about communities,  
community involvement, and the like. In one session (a round table  
discussion), someone asked about experiences with bounties. Turns out  
that none of the projects represented (all Linux distros in that case)  
are using bounties. And I think it's safe to say that our own  
experiments with bounties have failed (due to lack of rules for one  
thing, but there were also other factors). So I guess we need other  
ways to encourage people to contribute. Cleaning up our backlog (see  
above) would be a start.

Thoughts?

4) In one session, the concept of "ambassadors" for a project was  
discussed. I kind of like the idea: We should have more presence at  
open source events, for example. Since I can't be anywhere, members of  
the community could represent Geeklog elsewhere. For example, I know  
that Ivy gave presentations about Geeklog in Japan. We should embrace  
such volunteering and support it where possible. Note: These don't  
need to be developers. In fact, it may even be better if they aren't ;-)

Of course, this would need rules (as has also been stressed in that  
session). For example, an ambassador (or whatever we want to call it)  
should lose his or her status if they are inactive for too long.

Fedora has some information about their ambassador program on their wiki:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors_FAQ

Thoughts, opinions on that idea?

bye, Dirk