[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Too busy to accept help?

[From: Murray Cumming]

I'm not seeing any significant improvement to this situation, and
Nokia's developers seem no less busy. So I'm still wasting time chasing
incredibly minor patches.

I still think a dedicated empowered community liason would fix this.

As ever, I'm not complaining so much as trying to suggest how to make
things perfect.

On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 20:42 +0300, Carlos.Guerreiro at nokia.com wrote:
> Hi Murray,
> 
> > The Maemo community is alive, but not thriving as much as it 
> > could. This
> > is because the Nokia developers are so busy and are often unable to
> > respond to the simplest of requests for changes or information, and
> > often unable to even acknowledge that contributions have been 
> > accepted.
> > It's OK to be busy, so this isn't a personal attack on those 
> > developers.
> > It's a suggestion for how to take the weight off them.
> 
> Yes, the Maemo community could be more thriving, and insufficiently
> open development is a key limitation.
> Developers are busy working on the next release and don't have as much
> time as they would wish to interact with the community.
> Things will not always be like this, but at the moment that is the focus
> we have. There are many ways to disappoint, slow developer community
> development is one of them, but there's also the product.
> 
> However, as Tommi pointed out, an equality important factor here is that
> our product development processes and infrastructure are not yet fully
> adapted to open platform development. Developing consumer electronics
> products takes a lot more than platform software development. So those
> processes take time to change. They touch a countless number of aspects
> that constrain how development can be done, and often for good reasons,
> even though from the outside one cannot see why.
> To open up development in order to be more able to make good use of
> the community's help, we are changing the way we do many things. As
> Marius pointed out, a lot is actually happening there. It takes substantial
> energy and time to make it happen. Some of this results in things you can see
> (e.g.: bugzilla) but even more in things you cannot see, as it's about
> fixing internal obstacles and bottlenecks and preparing the ground.
> Things are moving, slowly but surely.
> 
> > I think Nokia needs to assign a dedicated community liaison, full time
> > or part time, while still demanding that all developers are involved
> > with the community as much as possible. This person would maintain the
> > web site, and help the community to maintain it by extracting
> > information from Nokia. This person would also do simple patch and bug
> > triage and apply obvious changes without bothering the developers with
> > trivial stuff.
> > 
> > It must be politically acceptable for this person to be under less
> > pressure than a regular developer. If the community liaison 
> > ever has no
> > problems to solve then that's good.
> > 
> > If you need a more traditional job title, you could squeeze these
> > responsibilities into "Documentation" or "Q & A".
> > 
> > Nokia will get a lot of the advantages of open source if they don't do
> > this, and the community will survive if they don't do this, 
> > but I think
> > the extra salary would be a good investment to get even more valuable
> > advantages.
> 
> All of these tasks are important. Many of them are being done to the
> extent possible by their available time by a number of hard working
> people who (too modestly) "hide" under team at maemo.org.
> They are more constrained by the current process and infrastructure
> limitations than anybody else.
> But it's the developers that are not involved enough. That's also
> slowly improving.
> 
> Having a full-time community liason is one option, and athought provoking
> suggestion to be taken seriously. It's not the only option however.
> 
> Definitely we could use more people.
> You'll notice we are hiring, we currently have a couple of positions
> open in nokia.com/careers, and we'll have more.
> http://careers.nokia.com/nokia/hr/recrsyst.nsf/WB2RR/C33176FEA7866248C22571380056A811?OpenDocument&Lang=Global
> 
> http://careers.nokia.com/nokia/hr/recrsyst.nsf/WB2RR/8A7C8A276B3D1F63C22570B3002683DB?OpenDocument&Lang=Global
> 
> Best regards,
> Carlos
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc at murrayc.com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com