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Re: [technology-pmc] [recommenders-dev] How to attract more research at eclipse?

Hi Marcel. I'm a member of the Technology PMC; of course I'm listening (FWIW, I listen on all PMC list and a great many project lists).

We've been doing a lot of work lately to try and make a few things easier for projects. The Common Build Infrastructure should make building a lot easier. A lot of projects just use the metadata driven websites rather than create their own; we're doing some work to make this even better and easier with the new Project Management Infrastructure initiative.

Can you be more specific about what parts of the entry barrier should be lowered? Is the proposal process too difficult/too time-consuming?

The Technology project was originally intended (at least partially) as a place for research projects. I think it's fair to say that it has evolved away from that. Maybe, as Ian suggests, we can start by making university research projects be more prominent on the site. We can do all of the things that you suggest within the scope of the Technology Project. Or maybe it's time to create a new top-level project.

Wayne

On 06/10/2012 05:10 AM, Marcel Bruch wrote:
Hi technology-pmc,

If this reads a bit like a rant, please excuse. It's not. Its intent is to get one or two ideas how to improve the current situation.


I'm just back from a research conference and have been asked by a bunch of researchers how potential collaborations with Eclipse and Code Recommenders in particular could look like. The scope of these works varies from applying Natural Language processing (NLP) on documentation, bringing NLP into code completion, integrating Code Recommenders into Code Bubbles, developing a parameter guessing recommender, collaborations on code search engines, mining on user interactions, and generally extending the idea of IDE 2.0 for lots of other ideas. 

I don't think that many of these ideas will actually turn into code at eclipse.org but if a few projects or ideas will do so, it would be a great success.

I wonder whether Eclipse could do more to get more research ideas into Eclipse and provide them a platform for their work. In my opinion putting something into the marketplace is not enough - research people don't get the feeling that they have a huge outreach there. Can't we do a little more that they get the feeling of being "part of Eclipse" rather than "yet another research prototype using Eclipse"?

Or can we lower the entrance barrier for research at Eclipse? I know that eclipselabs.org was (also) designed for this case, but do they work as expected? And: is providing a repository a useful support? What distinguishes it from SourceForge or GitHub? I think these research projects should be coupled more to existing Eclipse projects; they should be treated more like incubators with associated (top-level?) projects giving them a platform for instance with an aggregator update site, blog posts etc.

Also, projects still have to provide the whole infrastructure like a build server, a web server etc. on their own. We, for instance, have a shadow infrastructure with Bugzilla, Gerrit, Jenkins etc. running at the university from the first days which was a huge invest we had to make upfront.  And at the end everything still stays in the university network. This doesn't feel like open source then and such a huge support from my (very personal) viewpoint.



A few thoughts on whether or how we can change some things a little would be great. I hope the technology-pmc list is appropriate for this as I'm only hoping for some small changes inside technology top-level project but not for changes in the Eclipse bylaws ;) But maybe this should just go to the foundation. If so, I hope Wayne is listening.


Thanks,
Marcel


P.S.: I know the discussions about "researchers want to publish papers and don't want to support tools for long time". This is not the direction I would like to take in this post. It's about simplifying the process iff someone wants to go a few steps further - like we did with recommenders. It just doesn't need to be that hard as it was for us.


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Wayne Beaton
The Eclipse Foundation
Twitter: @waynebeaton
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