On Nov 15, 2007 12:32 AM, James Margaris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am one of the pimary committers on XAP. As far as the board report, I just > plain missed it until it was too late.
hi james > As far as the community building is concerned, yes the lists are basically > dead. However work does continue on the project, for better or worse. > > Part of the reason I stopped using the lists is that substantive responses > were rare. The only thing I ever got comments on were things like naming and > copyright notices. most podlings struggling on the stuff like that (so that's why i posted on those topics) but i probably should have focussed more on community building... > Of course that is a chicken and egg problem to some degree, there is no > community so nobody uses the lists to discuss so there is no community. the list is very good for users: polite, prompt replies by experts are typical. until someone who's interested in development shows up, this limits the scope for discussion. > It would help me if someone could help me understand how to make XAP more > appealing and interesting to the Apache community. Is the problem that there > are no good samples and demos? The website isn't good? Nobody understands > what the point is? i admit that i've been a little bit perplexed - everything i've seen is good (maybe even too good) but the key audience is not the apache community (typically, developers have more interests than energy to pursue them) but new independent developers from outside apache. it's this mix which makes [EMAIL PROTECTED] cool - it's great to work on a project with people scattered across the globe united by shared enthusiam for a technology. if you have a little time, review the tika archives: jukka and bertrand are members and understand community building but tika really didn't start kicking off until an independent developer showed up. > I like discussing technical issues with people but I don't like posting > technical thoughts only to be met consistently by silence. At that point it > becomes busywork, just going through the motions for the sake of appearances. if it's just going through the motions then it will be useless but open source projects @ apache only succeed when there are people who not only love to write cool software but also people who love to share cool software with others. the open source space is now very crowded: it's hard to get heard. talking about a project is a good way to get other people enthused. should be easy enough - XAP has some interesting and unusual features and AJAX is hot. blogs can be a useful side channel. www.planetapache.org is widely read and open to all apache committers. if you don't have a blog, jroller (for example) is read by a lot of java people. > The XAP project is not like projects like Kabuki that never did any > development and never responded on the lists. There is active development and > if someone ever posted to the lists I'm sure someone would respond. +1 > Right now posting on the lists feels like playing to an empty theater. i can appreciate why you say this. i prefer to think of it as conductive a monologue ;-) apache is highly ranked and the mailing lists well archived and indexed. each post is recorded and nothing wasted. words build a community. engineer the process for serendipity. - robert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
