Community Working Group (CWG) Meeting 3 February 2004

Action Items from last meeting

• Pieter to figure out what it would take to make and post a video of a demo. in process - need to change the resolution if we expect folks to be able to read the words.
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature. in process
• Pieter to talk to Katie and John about what talk Apps could give at OSCON. got blurb from Katie, sent off info to O'Reilly
• Pieter is to see about getting us a 90 minute slot to talk about both Apps and Repository. (Sent a description of the sessions to O'Reilly, have not heard back
• Ted to blog that Andi contributed code back to the Lucene project. was waiting until his repository documentation was complete, but he will blog separately if the doc isn't done by end of the week
• Ted (and possibly Andi) to get PyCon logistics set up.
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon.
• Ted to give Pieter a several-sentence summary of what a PyCon sprint is and why it is important for us to allocate resources to it right now. Pieter got it and made an announcement out of it
• Pieter to wordsmith that above summary into an announcement for the Web site and possibly mailing list. done, posted to website and maillists
• Ducky to monitor IRC with an eye towards capturing bits and reposting to email or wiki. Last IRC summarized in these minutes
• Ducky to write scripts for many more metrics. In progress
• Mitchell to raise issue of non-code 0.3 deliverables to Management meeting. done
• Ducky to put on agenda for next week: "what mailing lists/projects should we be paying attention"? Done
• Ducky to talk to Morgen/Jürgen about getting access to Web, Bugzilla, mailing list, and CVS info for metrics scripts. in progress
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes. Done
• Somebody to post StarterProjects projects to mailing lists.

Discussion

PyCon sprints

Three people have signed up for the PyCon sprint with Ted. Ted and Andi will have Ted's "Busy Developer's Guide", which is enough for local repository work, but the sprinters will need more documentation to do remote repository work. Ted to talk to Andi about further docs.

We will want a good description our policies for accepting code into the tree (copyright policy for example) before the Sprint so well can tell people about them. Mitchell is working on the overall policy issues. Ducky to make sure we get Ted and Andi adequate information on this.

At the next Community IRC, we should talk about our policies for accepting code into the tree.

Other events

We need to have gritty details for CPIA for OSCON, not just a pretty demo. We should start planning for that after the 0.4 release.

Mitch is giving a videotaped presentation for FOSDEM and FREEDOM.

Mitchell will be giving a talk to a Northwestern colleges consortium.

Last week's Office Hours

Last week's IRC brought up several examples of barriers to open-source participation:

• poor code documentation (a chronic problem)
• etiquette
• tools

For etiquette, some of the people on IRC who hadn't participated in an open source project before were intimidated by the etiquette: how did they get involved, when was it okay to do what, if they got CVS commit rights, how would they know if they were doing the right thing, etc. We noted that we should update the "how to get involved" page and explicitly give permission for various things. (There should also be a link to that page from StarterProjects.) Upgrading this page should probably be part of the 0.3 release process (see below).

Some of the people also said that they were intimidated by all the tools that you needed to know about -- there isn't a one-stop-shopping place for all you need to know about typical open source tool sets. While we probably shouldn't try to be one-stop-shopping for all the tools that are used on any open source project, we should probably have links on the "how to get involved" page to the tools that we do use (CVS, Bugzilla) and to BuildingChandlerDesktop (for the requirements section).

We should also have a link to "report a bug" on that page (and on the Web home page, for that matter)

Non-code 0.3 release items

It's time to start pulling together the various non-code deliverables (mostly documentation) we'd like to see for the 0.3 release. We know there are a set of technical items we hope to see. In addition, there are a set of dodcuments relating to the release itself that we should think about. We had a little discussion about which docs should be in the release, referencing ZeroPointTwoNonCodeReleaseActionItems and NonCodeReleaseProcess. We also talked about how it would be good to have some "backgrounder" pages; Pieter and Ducky to look for "backgrounder" info.

Open issues

• What external mailing lists and/or projects should OSAF invest effort in paying attention to?

Action Items

• Ted to blog that Andi contributed code back to the Lucene project.
• Ted (and possibly Andi) to get PyCon logistics set up.
• Ted to find out if we can do an official BOF at PyCon.
• Ted to talk to Andi about further docs for the sprint.
• Pieter to figure out what it would take to make and post a video of a demo.
• Pieter to put recent Community Working Group (CWG) progress into the Status Manager's "summarize" feature.
• Pieter is to see about getting us a 90 minute slot at OSCON to talk about both Apps and Repository.
• Pieter to work with Heikki to revamp the "For Developers" section of the Web site.
• Pieter and Ducky to look for "backgrounder" wiki pages for the 0.3 release.
• Ducky to work out what Ted needs to say about copyright assignments.
• Ducky to write scripts for many more metrics.
• Ducky to talk to Morgen/Jürgen about getting access to Web, Bugzilla, mailing list, and CVS info for metrics scripts.
• Ducky to write and post meeting notes.
• Somebody to post StarterProjects projects to mailing lists.
• (In two weeks) Ducky and Mitchell to rework community docs.

See next week's minutes.

-- DuckySherwood - 27 Jan 2004