Re: getting more participation for development

Hi Nick,

Thanks for developing your thoughts on this topic. I hope others will 
do the same. I am still pondering what can be learned from them, in the 
meantime, a few comments.

On Jun 24, 2005, at 22:09, Nick Kew wrote:
> On Thursday 23 June 2005 04:54, you wrote:
>> The tools our group is developing or maintaining are immensely
>> popular, yet we have been for a while, and remain, a very small
>> group.
>
> Isn't the service - rather than the software - the really popular 
> thing?

The service is, and I have seen clear signs that the software is being 
installed by many people and companies. I find that quite positive, 
even though the direct impact is hard to measure. Maybe that could be a 
lead to follow.

> Possibly the development process is not as public/high profile as it 
> could be?

That's very true. It is a bit puzzling, since the tool itself is very 
public and high profile (If I am not misunderstanding your meaning of 
it). I think part of this is due to the image of W3C being a closed 
ivory tower. Wwhether this is true or not is beyond the point here, but 
the fact is we manage projects inside this perceived closed world. 
Compare that to e.g apache or mozilla, at least in the general psyche 
these are tools before being organizations, foundations...

We could definitely shift the balance of our publicness a bit. Lately 
for instance, I am often frustrated by the lack of response on the 
qa-dev list. The fact that only its archives are public, and that 
subscription/posting is closed can be convenient, but also isolates the 
development. Same goes for our meeting: they are public, but the 
announcements and minutes are sent only to the closed list...

I agree, there is progress to be made in this area.
> In my capacity as an Apache hack, I've just got involved in the Google
> "Summer of Code", and may be mentoring students over the summer.
> Why didn't validator get involved in that?  Perhaps because the whole
> development process is too quiet and low-key?

Perhaps. I don't recall that being ever discussed in any of our 
meetings, or on the lists, and that was not on my radar, which may be 
another reason. And that's too bad...

> I do have a problem with w-v myself.  I feel my own ideas in this 
> project
> haven't really gone anywhere (for example, Xerces-based XML validation
> has languished on qa-dev for over three years, and XMLMessages are not
> being used).  My actual (accepted) contributions have been pretty 
> trivial.

Why do you think that is the case?
I would agree that we are not very efficient when it comes to the 
transition to "good idea" or even a prototype of "something we should 
try to interface with the validator" to a real integration into the 
products. I don't want to blame everything on the lack of resources, 
but whether it's a problem or a good idea, it's usually "do it 
yourself": I found that waiting for help on suchandssuch issue was 
futule and I end up taking care of it myself, and on the other side of 
the equation, I perhaps don't give enough input or help into others' 
ideas or problems.

Any idea how we could improve that?

Thanks
-- 
olivier

Received on Monday, 27 June 2005 06:17:04 UTC