On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 04:15:23PM -0400, David Nalley wrote:
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com
wrote:
One very important consideration going forward is, how many *self-service* resources exist for people to learn and grow skills on the platform?
All,
I'm the project lead of Zikula and I have been following this thread with interest because for many months I have silently worried about these topics and that the development and launch of Insight has, from my point of view, taken much longer than it really needs, especially because, in reality, Insight doesn't even demand anything particularly demanding from a Zikula platform perspective that might require more in-depth customization. Of course, I am acutely aware of the problems we all face in open-source, in that it's all effectively a hobby and people have to earn the bread and butter so individual time is limited. I can also understand all of your concerns about 'leaning on the Zikula people too much' etc, but this has given me exactly the right opportunity to speak.
Firstly, I am passionate about Zikula and I am lucky that I am able to work full time on the Zikula project without distractions from a 'have to do real job'. From my own perspective, Fedora's adoption of Zikula is a very positive thing for our project - one that is worth nurturing and caring for. Secondly, the Zikula project already has an active policy to care for things directly related to and that benefit Zikula. Not only do we care for the development of the Zikula core, but we indeed develop and care for a number of modules too, actively as a policy. After the next Zikula dot release, we will also move much more actively into documentation and training to raise awareness. I tell you all this because I want to so how active the Zikula project is with related projects. The pagemaster module that is being used for Insight is also being officially developed by the Zikula Foundation.
From my perspective, it would make perfect sense for some of our people to
join the Fedora project on a more official basis with the objectives of, a) bringing Insight to fruition, b) to be available for maintenance, and c) training some of you in the ways of Zikula over time. In doing this, you also do not have to feel you are taking advantage of us because we would be real Fedora volunteers passionate and interested in helping the Fedora project. I believe this will help Fedora in the long term and strategically for us, it is a good investment of our time and resources.
I hope I have not said anything wrong or offended anyone - I am just trying to find a practical solution with mutual benefit.
Regards,
Drak Project leader for Zikula.
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 07:04:53AM +0545, Drak wrote:
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 04:15:23PM -0400, David Nalley wrote: > On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Paul W. Frields <[1]stickster@gmail.com> wrote: One very important consideration going forward is, how many *self-service* resources exist for people to learn and grow skills on the platform?All, I'm the project lead of Zikula and I have been following this thread with interest because for many months I have silently worried about these topics and that the development and launch of Insight has, from my point of view, taken much longer than it really needs, especially because, in reality, Insight doesn't even demand anything particularly demanding from a Zikula platform perspective that might require more in-depth customization. Of course, I am acutely aware of the problems we all face in open-source, in that it's all effectively a hobby and people have to earn the bread and butter so individual time is limited. I can also understand all of your concerns about 'leaning on the Zikula people too much' etc, but this has given me exactly the right opportunity to speak.
Thanks for writing this reply Drak -- it's very much appreciated and people are happy to see your response here!
Firstly, I am passionate about Zikula and I am lucky that I am able to work full time on the Zikula project without distractions from a 'have to do real job'. From my own perspective, Fedora's adoption of Zikula is a very positive thing for our project - one that is worth nurturing and caring for.
I'm really happy to hear you say this. Our weekly meeting was very much oriented around how we need to grow a community of people in our Infrastructure/Websites team that care about not only Zikula but also expertise in PHP. Because there's a big field of applications out there beyond Zikula that, if we can't take advantage of them, could cause us strategic difficulties as a project.
Secondly, the Zikula project already has an active policy to care for things directly related to and that benefit Zikula. Not only do we care for the development of the Zikula core, but we indeed develop and care for a number of modules too, actively as a policy. After the next Zikula dot release, we will also move much more actively into documentation and training to raise awareness. I tell you all this because I want to so how active the Zikula project is with related projects. The pagemaster module that is being used for Insight is also being officially developed by the Zikula Foundation. From my perspective, it would make perfect sense for some of our people to join the Fedora project on a more official basis with the objectives of, a) bringing Insight to fruition, b) to be available for maintenance, and c) training some of you in the ways of Zikula over time. In doing this, you also do not have to feel you are taking advantage of us because we would be real Fedora volunteers passionate and interested in helping the Fedora project. I believe this will help Fedora in the long term and strategically for us, it is a good investment of our time and resources. I hope I have not said anything wrong or offended anyone - I am just trying to find a practical solution with mutual benefit. Regards, Drak Project leader for Zikula.
So to move forward with this, here's what I'd like to answer with your help:
* When should we set up our Insight meetings so that we can guarantee attendance from you and other Zikula members starting in the next week or two?
* In what ways can we attract not only Zikula but PHP expertise to complement our current group of Python experts in the Infrastructure and Websites teams?
We have ideas for milestones we'd like to set. You'll see them in our meeting minutes:
* AGREED: We should take Drak up on his offer, set up our weekly Insight meeting at a time where he can participate, and then work toward a June 15th milestone. At that point, anyone should be able to type in "fedoraproject.org/insight" into a web browser and see the latest FWN issue and get to any archives we have available at that point. (stickster, 18:39:35) * AGREED: 30 days following we have a way to (1) promote a Planet story to a separate Insight feed without having to copy/paste or retype it, and (2) both this content stream and the FWN can be visible/RSS at once (stickster, 18:51:14)
(from http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-mktg/2010-04-29/fedora_insight.2010-...)
This is really just a subset of the concepts for Insight seen here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight#Content_workflow
I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about the meeting, my questions above, and these goals. And thank you very much for your involvement and support!
On 30 April 2010 05:30, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com wrote:
- When should we set up our Insight meetings so that we can guarantee
attendance from you and other Zikula members starting in the next week or two?
The problem for me is I am currently in Nepal which makes participation in real chats difficult for me.
- In what ways can we attract not only Zikula but PHP expertise to
complement our current group of Python experts in the Infrastructure and Websites teams?
I am not entirely sure, this is a problem even we face - the level of PHP experience in any community based PHP projects is usually very low because contributors by nature are hobbyists and not professional (trained) PHP programmers. I am not sure the kind of users Fedora attracts and how much they are interested in web applications given Fedora is primarily an computer operating system.
Our strategy is to raise the bar of the codebase. Since Zikula's origins were way back in the PHP 4 days, modern programmers could write off Zikula 1.x at first glance (even though most enterprise patterns are there, but in procedural code rather than OOP) - so that can be a barrier even for us to attracting modern talent. To tackle this, my plan is to produce training videos, of which I've already completed several - the plan is to give training on modern PHP programming, step by step, and then use that as a basis to introduce writing applications in Zikula.
My belief is that by a) raising the bar, and b) providing training to raise our developer community understanding of modern PHP programming we will be able to attract more talent.
For us, we can do this directly because our main focus is something written in PHP - for Fedora, I really don't know how that would be so easy, and as I said before, if you look around at most community based PHP projects, the level of understanding of PHP is generally quite low which is maintained by the fact they often have large userbases and cannot afford to break backward-compatibility, thus perpetuating poor quality (old PHP4 code has lots of dependencies due to lack of OO design and is therefor difficult to comprehend and further develop).
From my own experience, enthusiasm is something that breeds from seeing
amazing. If we (Zikula people) can just give you the all signing bells and whistles for Insight first, then that will surely inspire people. Unfortunately, the Insight project seems to have dragged on and possibly there is less enthusiasm because of this. It's must easier to get to understand Zikula from a fully working example.
Objectively speaking, Zikula is flat out, one of the most powerful web application platforms in existance and really does provide a 'full-stack'. The level of customisability is beyond anything of other competitors and the truth is, mostly all Zikula is missing is a UI to that advanced customisability. Modules like Pagemaster are actually a one stop shop for just about anything you could ever want to do on the web. Once you guys have a kickass system and once your people start using it, it will surely breed enthusiasm and interest, which is the first step to raising the bar. When I joined OSS some 10 years ago, I didnt know the first thing about PHP, but it was the enthusiasm for what I saw was possible that drove me to learn more. I think this is surely a starting point for bringing more PHP talents to the project.
Anyway, I think I might have digressed :-P
We have ideas for milestones we'd like to set. You'll see them in our meeting minutes:
- AGREED: We should take Drak up on his offer, set up our weekly Insight meeting at a time where he can participate, and then work toward a June 15th milestone. At that point, anyone should be able to type in "fedoraproject.org/insight" into a web browser and see the latest FWN issue and get to any archives we have available at that point. (stickster, 18:39:35)
I have talked with Mateo about taking on this responsibility because Mateo has an unusual combination of talents. Not only is he an awesome programmer but he's a highly talented web designer with professional HTML/CSS skills (usually you either program or design, but never both). Mateo is in a more amenable timezone (Columbia) so he should be able to attend meetings more easily. Mateo will probably not be available for a week due to moving house, but I think he would be the best option for you guys to push Insight into production.
* AGREED: 30 days following we have a way to (1) promote a Planet
story to a separate Insight feed without having to copy/paste or retype it, and (2) both this content stream and the FWN can be visible/RSS at once (stickster, 18:51:14)
Piece of cake ;-)
Drak
Indeed I feel I'm the one to put the last effort to get the site out.
I just arrived to Colombia, and my plan is to be in my house in about three days after some family stuff. Greetings! :)
Mateo Mis principios... son mis fines
I have talked with Mateo about taking on this responsibility because Mateo
has an unusual combination of talents. Not only is he an awesome programmer but he's a highly talented web designer with professional HTML/CSS skills (usually you either program or design, but never both). Mateo is in a more amenable timezone (Columbia) so he should be able to attend meetings more easily. Mateo will probably not be available for a week due to moving house, but I think he would be the best option for you guys to push Insight into production.
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 11:03:27PM -0500, Mateo TibaPalacios wrote:
Indeed I feel I'm the one to put the last effort to get the site out. I just arrived to Colombia, and my plan is to be in my house in about three days after some family stuff. Greetings! :) Mateo Mis principios... son mis fines
I have talked with Mateo about taking on this responsibility because Mateo has an unusual combination of talents. �Not only is he an awesome programmer but he's a highly talented web designer with professional HTML/CSS skills (usually you either program or design, but never both). �Mateo is in a more�amenable timezone (Columbia) so he should be able to attend meetings more easily. �Mateo will probably not be available for a week due to moving house, but I think he would be the best option for you guys to push Insight into production.
Would it make sense for us to hold the next Insight meeting on Thursday May 13, but plan to rendezvous online on IRC #fedora-mktg before that date?
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 04:32:29PM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 11:03:27PM -0500, Mateo TibaPalacios wrote:
Indeed I feel I'm the one to put the last effort to get the site out. I just arrived to Colombia, and my plan is to be in my house in about three days after some family stuff. Greetings! :) Mateo Mis principios... son mis fines
I have talked with Mateo about taking on this responsibility because Mateo has an unusual combination of talents. �Not only is he an awesome programmer but he's a highly talented web designer with professional HTML/CSS skills (usually you either program or design, but never both). �Mateo is in a more�amenable timezone (Columbia) so he should be able to attend meetings more easily. �Mateo will probably not be available for a week due to moving house, but I think he would be the best option for you guys to push Insight into production.Would it make sense for us to hold the next Insight meeting on Thursday May 13, but plan to rendezvous online on IRC #fedora-mktg before that date?
Given there was no response to this thread, I'm going to proceed under that plan. We'll next meet on Thursday May 13 at 1800 UTC, so Mateo can attend.
logistics@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Drak -
Mateo TibaPalacios -
Paul W. Frields