[PLUG-Devel] "managing" open source projects

[der.hans]

Am 07. Sep, 2006 schwätzte Ted Gould so:

> On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Josh Coffman wrote:
>>  Anyone know how large OSS project work on a
>> day-2-day and dev cylcle basis? In particular, the
>> kernel team.. don't they mostly use email and IM to
>> coordinate? And how do they appoint tasks?
>
> I'm a developer on the Inkscape project (http://www.inkscape.org -- tell all 
> your friends :)

Please do! :)

> Now, this is different than working on a distributed team.  Many projects 
> work with distributed teams (as Hans talked about) -- when you're motivating 
> people with money, you can take that money away based on them not doing 
> something.  So 'assigning' makes more sense.  Probably the only way most 
> hackers would attempt an Exchange plugin for Evolution ;)

Ugh. That's an icky thought :). Actually, I'm very grateful for those
working on Evolution as I'm stuck with eXpunge at work :(.

As a follow up to what I wrote before, this last weekend we did rolled
out several infrastructure changes. It was 3 solid days of long days and
nights that followed a week of long days and nights getting ready for the
rollout.

In the course of the rollout I was paying attention to three different IRC
channels ( one mostly for fun ) and private messages with various people
and also and IM to a lesser extent.

As I was working it occured to me that there was no way I could've done
that much collaboration via phone or in person. Too much to track all at
one time.

By having text records I could read what I'd missed while I was paying
attention elsewhere. I was also able to read scrollback to find out what
I'd missed when napping. Good that I had since there was a major bug for
some of my customers that I otherwise wouldn't've known about as it didn't
directly affect me.

There was also the hundreds of emails...

All from the comfort of my home office.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  https://www.LuftHans.com/        http://www.CiscoLearning.org/
#  Join the League of Professional System Administrators! https://LOPSA.org/
#  As we enjoy great Advantages from the
#  Inventions of others we should be glad of an
#  Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours,
#  and this we should do freely and generously.
#  -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), on his refusal to patent his inventions.