Re: [libreoffice-website] [Drupal] The road ahead and missed opportunities

First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer.

On 01/19/2011 10:22 AM, Narayan Aras wrote:

> BTW I have consistently maintained that mail lists are not suitable to capture such matters.
> There are easy solutions available. But SC is not interested.
> So SC has to blame itself for (a) not reading the mail list. and (b) not installing proper tools.

Can we say that the SC did not receive enough inputs to correct these 
mistakes? We have gone through months of 18 hours per day work schedule 
and we have probably been less responsive than we should have been. But 
it should be clear that we are volunteers with a professional and a 
personal life, and we are far from being perfect.

> Well, note that the mail lists cannot distinguish between "approved" tasks, "unautorized" tasks and "new 
> proposals".
> Further, within an approved project, you cannot control each and every aspect that is proposed.
> This is an inherent weakness of mail list.

This is true.

> Otherwise Sc can NOT keep track of which mails are within scope and which are extraneous.

This is true as well.

> Even with this, SC can NOT prevent members from making new proposals.

I think that here lies one misunderstanding. New proposals are welcome, 
but they should consider the history of the project and start from here 
(therefore, if the new proposal diverges from the history, then it is 
important to get consensus before going forward).

As I said somewhere: evolution and not revolution. We can, and should, 
change radically some habits, but it takes time. Sometimes, it takes 
twice the effort.

> Either lead, be lead or get out of the way! Sleeping at the helm is not a viable option.

We were not sleeping but doing other things. Yes, this was a mistake.

> Look, pedigree is useful in a dog show, not here.
> I think we should focus on merit of an idea, not WHO proposed it.

Of course, but sometimes experience helps. In sever years, I never 
talked about my background, and in this case it was just an example. 
Someone has to judge the merit of an idea, and experience allows to have 
at least a more informed judgement.

> The original word I used was "stakeholder" which means anyone who has an interest in the product.
> This term goes beyond the "users".

Stakeholder is a common word of my profession, and I understood roles as 
well. The problem is that the website strategy was to have the web as 
the entry point, and this was a mistake.

History tells us that the web is not the entry point to the project. 
This might change in the future.

I would dare to say that most volunteers today participate without ever 
accessing the web site. Again, this might change in the future, but I do 
not see this happening for many people.

For instance, in Italy there is a gentleman (nickname Martello, which 
means Hammer in Italian) who is generating on a monthly basis a PDF FAQ 
document based on the newsgroup discussions (over 3000 pages now) and 
has never accessed the web site.

This is just an example.

So, if we define stakeholders we have way more than 23, and some of them 
interacting in a weird way with the project.

For instance, the Italian association (I am the president) has a web 
site which is never going to be officially connected to TDF and/or 
LibreOffice.

> But later someone suggested that a given team can act as multiple types of stakeholders.
> So I changed the term to "role" to avoid confusion.
> The idea is that any person/team can play multiple roles; and there may be churn in how these roles 
> are played.
> The website should be flexible enough so that its interface changes to accommodate any role-mix.

I think that the basic mistake (and the SC should have shown the problem 
at the very beginning, having a better management of the web project) 
has been to conceive a web site which was departing from the background 
of the project without offering at first a parallel path, and later a 
convergence path.

> Although some of the roles can be combined, their specific needs cannot be ignored.
> Each role-player would be using the website for his daily/weekly/monthly tasks.
> All this work is interrelated: Someone's output is used by someone else.
> So we cannot skip roles.

But you cannot force people to use the web site for their tasks, either. 
TDF brings together developers and users, and you cannot build the 
project assuming that everyone will accept to use certain tools. I use 
my own tools, and I am not going to change them because there are other 
tools available on a web site, because this would disrupt my habits and 
interphere with my professional life (as I use the same one for both).

> Thanks for trying to bring truce, but all software development guys already know what we mean.
> The idea is neither new not does it need to be sold.

Again, this is a misunderstanding. The idea is completely new for the 
history of the project, and as it represents a total departure from the 
history has to be sold. We have already seen a central infrastructure 
failing completely (CollabNet) and creating a huge amount of 
frustrations and misunderstanding.

We have already seen many "this is going to be perfect for you" stories 
to believe them once more.

SC mistakes were not to make this concept completely clear from day one, 
and to overlook the development of the web site to the point that the 
development itself has gone out of control.

Web team mistake has been to assume that any solution would have been 
accepted independently from the level of departure it was representing 
from the history of the project, and to assume that we web site could 
become the cornerstone of TDF.

I hope this makes things more easy to understand.

Ciao, Italo

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Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
Mobile +39.348.5653829 - VoIP: +39.02.320621813
Skype: italovignoli - GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

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