Re: [technology-pmc] ACTF community development

[Wayne Beaton <wayne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

For starters, you need to identify your community. Who is your target
community? Are there companies, universities, organizations, individuals
of an ilk who should be interested in the project?

Who are your current adopters?

How do you reach out to people? Are there forums that you can
participate in, conferences that you should attend to meet these people?

Does anybody on the team have a blog aggregated on Planet Eclipse? Is
the blogger active? Are there other blog aggregators that you can hook
up to?

Are you keeping an eye on the newsgroup? Are questions answered in a
timely manner?

Make things as easy as possible for those people. Make sure that your
site is up-to-date; especially your plan. Make sure that the
conversations you have about the project are captured in a public forum
such as the mailing list or wiki.

Is at least one committer from your project on the technology-pmc
mailing list (due to privacy restrictions, I'm not able to find out
myself).

I'll be on vacation for the next ten days or so. I'll be in touch when I
get back.

Thanks,

Wayne


On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 13:27 -0500, Michael A Squillace wrote:
> Wayne:
> Thank you for your interest in our community's growth and vitality. Indeed,
> we have had problems growing the community. This was evident, for example,
> at EclipseCon at which our talks were very sparsely attended. Accessibility
> is something that few are interested in and even fewer practice in their
> everyday content-authoring and software life cycle. We are also,
> unfortunately, suffering from poor project leadership. As a co-technical
> lead, I deny none of the points made below. We have a few adopters of ACTF
> tooling - ACTF AcProbe being one example - but uptake on actual componentry
> integrated into the Eclipse framework is almost non-existent. If you have
> any suggestions on what we can do to grow the community and enhance its
> vitality, we are all ears. Please let us know how we can proceeed.
> 
> --> Mike Squillace
> IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center
> Austin, TX
> 
> W:512.823.7423
> M:512.970.0066
> 
> masquill@xxxxxxxxxx
> www.ibm.com/able
> 
> 
>                                                                            
>              Wayne Beaton                                                  
>              <wayne@xxxxxxxxxx                                             
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>                                                                    Subject 
>              08/06/2008 12:42          [technology-pmc] ACTF community     
>              PM                        development                         
>                                                                            
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>              Please respond to                                             
>               Technology PMC                                               
>              <technology-pmc@e                                             
>                 clipse.org>                                                
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings ACTF developers,
> 
> I've been looking over your project and have noticed that, while you
> seem to be doing a great job of getting code into CVS, your community
> development efforts don't seem to be bearing fruit.
> 
> Specifically,
> 
> * There is relatively little activity on the actf-dev mailing list.
> 
> * There is almost no activity on the newsgroup
> 
> * All but one of the bug reports in Bugzilla were reported by project
> committers (I didn't fully scrutinize the list, but this appears to be
> correct; at very least all but one of the bug reports comes from a
> ibm.com address).
> 
> * You have future releases indicated, but the project plan is quite out
> of date (it ends at 1Q2008).
> 
> I am encouraged by the nature of many of the bug reports; they do seem
> to indicate that you're trying to be transparent in introducing
> enhancements. Unfortunately, the few reports that I reviewed seemed a
> little short. That is, there is very little discussion around the
> features which leads me to believe that--by the time the bug has been
> created--you've already decided what to do (which, in turn, leads me to
> believe that most of your planning is done in private).
> 
> Transparency is an important part of being an Eclipse project and a
> valuable tool for attracting community. Having a thriving community is
> also an important part of being an Eclipse project.
> 
> As far as I can tell, there is basically no community developing around
> the project.
> 
> Have I missed something? Are you engaging your community using different
> mechanisms? Can you point to a couple of adopters of ACTF technology?
> 
> More importantly, is there something that I can do to help you develop a
> community around ACTF?
> 
> Wayne Beaton
> Eclipse Technology Project PMC
> 
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