Informal Survey - what can we do to improve the team and community?

[Elpie]

In April 2001, Mambo became open source under the GPL - its our foss birthday month right now! Over time, and particularly in the last three years, Mambo has undergone a lot of changes. 2 1/2 years ago we went through the biggest change of all with the Joomla! fork.

At the moment, the team is going through a restructuring so that we are set up properly to take Mambo forward into the future. The way the team worked in 2005 worked well for bringing Mambo back from potential disaster. We have made a few changes along the way but we know we can do better.

One of the things we are looking at doing is taking development discussions out into a mailing list that anyone can join and can contribute ideas to (and even code suggestions). Do you think this is a good idea? If you are a developer, would doing this encourage you to participate?

What else should we look at doing? Are there any barriers to your contributions that we may not be aware of?

The team works hard at being here, on the forums and part of our community. We want Mambo to be inclusive and friendly, and to encourage contributions. How can we improve this?

Share your thoughts here please (constructive only - we want this thread to be something of value that we can use for improving things, not an opportunity for criticism that would only discourage the team).

[alisoncc]

Improve the speed of the forum and code servers. I have been trying at one hour intervals over the last twelve hours to download MostlyCE V3.0 without success from mambo-code.org. And the response times of the various forum servers is atrocious.

I get faster response times from my development server at home running on copper to a DSLAM.

Alison

[ocs]

Originally Posted by alisoncc

Improve the speed of the forum and code servers. I have been trying at one hour intervals over the last twelve hours to download MostlyCE V3.0 without success from mambo-code.org. And the response times of the various forum servers is atrocious.

I get faster response times from my development server at home running on copper to a DSLAM.

Alison

Luckily, we have use SourceForge as a "backup" repository for MOStlyCE .

You can grab it @ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mostlyce/

Don't want to sidetrack this thread, but had to put the link over here. Hopefully the forum will stay up long enough, for you to be able to read this post.

[Elpie]

Thanks for the feedback folks - its all good stuff!

I'm not sure why you have speed issues with the forum Alison, but we will look into this. Yours is the first report that the forum is slow. Thanks for letting us know.

@Cem - the forum hasn't experienced any outages and the only down time for several months has been when we have been doing vBulletin upgrades. These have been announced on the forum in advance. If you subscribe to the announcements forum you can get notification sent to your inbox.

Keep 'em coming folks. We want your feedback on what can be done to improve things.

[dpk]

There are a lot of barriers and obstacles. No feed, mailing list, or even the "newsroom" page (or any page) here will tell me:

-security news/updates, at least for key stuff in the core distro, like mostlyce
-what's going on with MF and the core team every month or so
-core development status

Only after digging around and finding stuff on external sites am I able to figure out (today) that:

-elpie made helpful security announcements back in February.
-most of the core dev team left to start a new fork at the end of April.

I've had similar experiences in the past, just nothing this drastic in the news, so I've just accepted I have to dig through here periodically myself. If every open source web app I use was like this, it would be terrible. Fortunately many are far more effective at keeping their vital stats in plain view--and it would be good if Mambo got on that track, especially now.

I don't think it's ever been possible to easily find out, at a glance, who the team members are. That plus the board should be easy to find from the MF front page, possibly tied to a blog with monthly posts about productive things that are being accomplished. Failing this, the general impression is that productive things are NOT being accomplished.

The practical reality is this: 99.99% of Mambo users (and prospective Mambo users) just want to know how healthy Mambo is as an organization and software application. Who is in charge of what, and what are they doing--with dates and chronological records. Absent this there is no basis for confidence, certainly not in light of a second fork involving core team members. I don't give a rip about the he said-she said, I just want to know the objective facts that indicate the health and future of this and any project.

[Tengu]

Very good points dpk!

[dpk]

keep in mind I'm not trying to stir any pots. this mambo research and news is wasting my day when I am supposed to be working on another project--which is not being done with Mambo. I use a lot of different FOSS systems--whatever a given project needs. But Mambo has not been in the running for a while. I like its roadmap. I have been hopeful. I'd still like legitimate reasons to be hopeful. But *if* they aren't there, we're all wasting our time.

I've gotten fine help from elpie, tengu, chanh, cauld, and many others since I started with Mambo--not knowing about another recent fork at that time. I can't keep track of who stands where and don't want to. I'd like to assume the best of all involved -- and have reasons to do so provided by team Mambo, especially if you're going to be so transparent about your breakdowns.

[Tengu]

It takes a bit more to stir my pot As a general rule of thumb I believe any project should be as transparent as possible. And indeed, if users want to use a CMS they should be damn sure it is a stable project and they should be able to judge that themselves. They should be transparent in a "high" and in a "low", even though it isn't very smart PR wise in the short run.

Having said that, no one would probably ever hire me as a PR man in any organisation

[dpk]

I agree, but when I see dirty forum laundry I think "maaan, I can spend a few hours trying to figure out the backstory and get an idea what is really true here, but then I still wouldn't be sure--there's probably truth on both sides."

To avoid the bickering and spin, it would help to have a professional and sufficiently diverse group running a news/review/watch site where civil discussion occurs and capable people write articles. Diverse=knowledgaeble writers who aren't necessarily part of the little fan ghetto of a certain piece of software. Make drupal junkies write about mambo. Could be a useful exchange. Someone take that idea and run with it.

Main thing that matters to a project is regular, functioning releases.

I'll be back in another few months to see if there is one to be had here.

[Tengu]

Originally Posted by dpk

I agree, but when I see dirty forum laundry I think "maaan, I can spend a few hours trying to figure out the backstory and get an idea what is really true here, but then I still wouldn't be sure--there's probably truth on both sides."

Well, in a fight there is always truth to both sides. And on both sides people spin the story in a way they are right. People can fight, but as you can probably conclude from my missing forum titles, without me

Originally Posted by dpk

To avoid the bickering and spin, it would help to have a professional and sufficiently diverse group running a news/review/watch site where civil discussion occurs and capable people write articles. Diverse=knowledgaeble writers who aren't necessarily part of the little fan ghetto of a certain piece of software. Make drupal junkies write about mambo. Could be a useful exchange. Someone take that idea and run with it.

Good idea. There are a couple of these watch-sites out there but perhaps you could even start your own forum. Perhaps it could even help bringing the OS systems more together? Or would that be naive?

Originally Posted by dpk

Main thing that matters to a project is regular, functioning releases. I'll be back in another few months to see if there is one to be had here.

Ok, well I am as curious about that as you are.