Robert Mann wrote:
> As the situation stands, livecode drives the whole lot. So community
> money contributors just support "blindly" livecode without any form
> of representation. I wonder how long that can go on just like that.
Part of the role of a Community Manager is as a sort of ombudsman, an
advocate for community interests in discussions with the core dev team.
Ask Peter or Kevin and they'll tell you that much of our regular
meetings involve my advocacy for community interests.
One of the challenges is determining exactly what those community
interests are. This thread is a good example: first there was a
request for SFTP, the SMTP, then audio recording, and others.
To help turn myriad list posts into actionable information, LiveCode
conducts several surveys of the user base each year. But of course
surveys are very limited in more ways than are worth listing here, so
data collected there is augmented with many discussions both internal
and with your Community advocate to help sort them out into priorities.
As with any software project, priorities are best served by attempting
to gauge return on investment. For example, if we have a hundreds posts
for a feature but those posts are from a single user, even a feature
less frequently discussed may take priority if it's determined to
benefit a larger number of users.
Those priorities are also weighed against cost of delivery. While we do
occasionally see requests specific to one platform, most requests cover
multiple platforms. As we can see from the very small number of
high-level scripting languages that offer integrated GUI support across
seven platforms, this is evidently not a trivial task; few projects even
attempt it at all.
Most of the Kickstarter goals have been delivered, the rest actively in
development, and the Feature Exchange items have been in direct response
to user requests. In each case, participation in the fundraiser has
always been completely optional for us - if we see something we like we
can fund it, and even if we don't the Community Edition has and will
continue to benefit from those, and everyone, contributor or not, has
free and open access to it.
If there's a specific feature you had in mind, let's talk about it. If
a positive ROI for it can be determined it'll likely get done.
Many larger projects enjoy something we don't yet have: outside
companies paying full-time salaries for developers contributing to the
software. For example, Google and others pay several staffers to
contribute to Python, and a friend at Heroku told me last night that he
has a couple excellent engineers whose full-time job is submit pull
requests for postgreSQL.
As the LiveCode projects grows we're seeing a bit of that, even if at a
smaller scale than full-time staffers. For example, David Simpson of
.Com Solutions needed some specific clipboard enhancements, so he
contacted the team, got a quote he found reasonable, and covered the
development cost. Those enhancements are now in all LiveCode editions,
including the Community Edition (thank you David!).
What we all want to avoid is being another TideSDK. That was an open
source project where Appcellerator spun out their desktop platforms so
they could focus their considerable investment on just two (iOS and
Android). The desktop project deployed to Mac, Windows, and Linux, and
was released under permissive license so it was fully dependent on
donations alone. A couple years ago one of their blog posts noted that
they'd received less than $600 in donations for the entirety of that
year. The project has since died for lack of funding.
The mix of development options LiveCode has offered to date represent
their best effort at measuring community interest balanced with ROI.
But like any process, there's always room for refinement.
So like I said, if there's a specific feature you want let's discuss it
and see how we can put together the resources to make it happen.
--
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Liaison
rich...@livecode.org
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