Administrative updates

[Waldemar Kornewald]

Brian Rice wrote:
> My Communication Style - As has been a bit of a tacit "open secret"  
> about the way the project is run, I primarily have interacted with  
> people via IRC which is largely more productive than what most others  
> do on said medium, but is of course in general a bit of a waste of  
> time as the center of a communication style. What I need to do is  
> maintain a blog and generally insist that proposals make it through  
> email and blog discussions rather than in IRC, regardless of the  
> public logging. So to that end, I am committing to only spend time on  
> IRC for specific requests and meetings which I would like to schedule  
> via this mailing list. Otherwise I'm going to try to set up a blog/ 
> CMS system on the new server and publish my thoughts that way. It  
> does concern me that email and blog content should not be too  
> redundant to save effort on my part, so I'll try to figure a decent  
> dividing line there. I'm also trusting those who do like the IRC  
> channel to take part in assisting other users who are new in  
> explaining concepts and getting them started. Hopefully by doing this  
> we can all be a little more effective in gathering and filtering  
> information/feedback.

I think it's good that you want to spend less time on IRC. Personally, I 
feel that it makes *me* spend too much time on chatting than on coding. 
In the end, I'm less productive than without IRC.

> Project Public Representation - It's pretty obvious (to me and others  
> I'm sure) that our website does not really reveal as much as it  
> should about what's good and relevant about our project and how it  
> works, and basically for me the bottleneck has been the fact that I  
> manually edit the server HTML and CSS in order to update the website  
> and that some kind of CMS is in order to make news/structuring/layout  
> much easier to deal with. I am leaning towards Pier, a CMS on Seaside/ 
> Squeak, or Plone, or one of the other big-flexible frameworks for  
> managing website components. Suggestions for particular things about  
> website improvement or modules that should be there would be much  
> welcome.

You probably don't want anything PHP-based, but maybe you would like to 
try Sitellite CMS (though, it's difficult to install). I like Plone as a 
community CMS where everyone can contribute and a moderator publishes 
those changes (but surely moderation is too much work for you alone, so 
you'd need volunteers for the website).
Did you consider using a bug/ticket tracker? Having bugs reported via 
IRC might work for now, but that could change quickly. Also, a detailed 
task list for every milestone could help to get more focused development 
and reduce the number of people asking "What can I do?". I'm currently 
working on Collaboa (Rails-based), but Trac is a little bit more usable, 
ATM.

Bye,
Waldemar