Supporting the open source community
It feels like we're on the brink of becoming a mature open source project, supporting independent installations and accepting patches from remote contributors.
To do justice to that status, we need to resource the support of our community. I wanted to kick this thread off to brainstorm ideas about what kind of work is involved, and who might be interested in doing it.
Off the top of my head, some of the jobs include:
- engaging with other open source communities on social media, e.g. someone should reply to this twitter conversation and offer them any support they need
- responding to Github issues. The issues list is just starting to get some attention from the community, now we need a process to handle them as they come in and move them quickly
- processing pull requests from remote contributors. We've had a couple of remote pull requests lately and they tend to stagnate because they're not part of the sprint. If I were a remote contributor, that would be a shitty experience for me.
In addition to this 'community management' type of work, we also need to think about modifying our release strategy to be more friendly to independent instances. Is it time for proper versioning?
I can do some of this work but I feel like it's the kind of thing where we actually have ample skills across the team, so I would prefer to leave it to someone else to lead.
What do you think?
Robert Guthrie Wed 22 Jan 2014 7:20AM
I agree with the intent @jonlemmon but have a feeling that we should put effort into enabling plugins so people can develop on loomio completely independently.
Example plugins and complete design freedom would be more exciting to radicals than , "here is an almost perfectly designed idea, all you need to do is build it for us".
Please excuse me if I've misunderstood what you're saying
Jon Lemmon · Tue 21 Jan 2014 9:56PM
Agreed!
One thing I keep coming back to as well is that if we have "approved" designs that anyone can implement, then it will make accepting pull-requests for us way easier because we can say "this design was already approved".
Basically, I think we wanna be doing more of the enabling work that allows other people to start contributing to our project.