OT - starting a project

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 17 May 2016 16:38:06 -0700
David Schwartz <newsletters at thetoolwiz.com> wrote:

> Hey, guys, I have a very general question
> 
> There’s an idea I’ve had for quite a while, and was chatting with
> someone recently who suggested I set up an open-source kind of
> project for it.
> 
> The problem is, I don’t really want to do the programming on it. I
> want to be the architect and direct some other developers. 
> 
> So what’s the best way to find a couple of people who’d like to work
> on an app part-time?
> 
> Honetsly, I don’t care what it’s implemented in initially; a browser
> app is fine, but it needs to read and write to a file system (local
> and/or cloud-based).
> 
> Right now I’m just looking to build a proof-of-concept model and
> extend it one step at a time.
> 
> The main architecture is an interactive graphical editor roughly
> similar to Visio, but then it goes off into some interesting
> directoins.
> 
> Any ideas?

Hi David,

My first suggestion would be to read Eric Raymond's (ESR's) "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar". To this day I think he hit it right on the
head. Somewhere I have the print book, but there's also an unauthorized
PDF here:

http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf

The reason I think you need to rethink your not wanting to do the
coding is the following ESR advice:

=================================================================
When you start community-building, what you need to be able
to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work
particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly
documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince
potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really
neat in the foreseeable future.
=================================================================

In other words, cobble together a rickety prototype, write a manifesto
of the program with its priorities and its future, and put it out
there, and announce the heck out of it.

I suggest you also read the following:

http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/200310/200310.htm

The preceding link is the early story of VimOutliner, an outline
processor that I originated. If you saw version 0.1.3, the first
version, you'd laugh til your ribs crack. I cobbled it together with a
combination of Vim, ex scripts, and Perl scripts. It was hardly
recognizable as an outline processor.

But, as ESR demanded, it ran, and an outline loving person could use it
to author outlines very rapidly. So the project acquired programmers
far more skilled than I, and quickly became something much more useful
than I could have ever put out.

But if I'd tried to get those guys to code the prototype, it never
would have happened.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21