About your post for community involvement in MOC development.

Submitted by dreyeth on Fri, 2014-11-21 05:28

Forums:

About the return on your post about community involvement in MOC development, especially about issues that you don't have the time to handle outside of the actual core moc coding.

There is some issues I've seen with the post that leads me to believe most people probable never even read it.

1. You buried it in a post called moc tenth aniversary, rather then putting it up with a clear post subject requesting more community involvement, to leave you free to code.

2. Reading the post requires clicking 'more' to see the rest of the post,
people that wheren't interested in a article about the tenth aniversary didn't click it.

3. Its buried inside a large road map about moc development, posted in in article that the tl;dr crowd (even developers can be part of it) didn't read all the way through, and so requires reading the entire rather lengthy blog post to see that part of it.

4. The need for contributors is understated a little in the post, its very well written about code organization, and how you want to just focus
on the code base and leave the plugins to thirdy parties.

5. In my experience of dealing with people in community projects (MMO clans, lol, eh, people are people), people don't step up for ambigously declared places they can step up to, you have to clearly define what they're going to be doing what their tools are where they can go to immediately take over that role, and directly define who they're going to be interacting with or what they're going to manage, so they can fit right into the role, return on involvement in a project is quicker and more productive if you make it simple (brain dead) to clearly step into a place or role.

I probable have more to see but I'm going to post this and think for a minute.

dreyeth

Fri, 2014-11-21 06:36

People don't generally step up without clear cut information on how they can intergrate with the current infrastructure.

First off is ensuring people who actually visit the site read it (probable none did) by putting up a post on the top of the blog, (I'd put it over your standard blog role so future posts to your blog roll pop up under it for awhile).

It should be shorter then the click here to read more, with a subject title something like a call for contributors, project help needed, maybe with a immediate post to a wiki about stuff that needs doing and where to step into the roles.

Drupal has base support for a wiki OOB doesn't it?, I'm no pro on content management systems, but I've installed quite a few of them to play around with their admin panels and content organization methodologies to see which I like.

Directly ask for people you need testing regularly updated svn builds with coding experience on the platforms that don't have regular testers.
I need someone to test SVN build and library intergration and run the code to check for bugs on OpenBSD etc nobody has stepped up to that plate, people have a tendancy to be what you need and not reply, if not hit over the head with it.

If you limit what you need in a certain area that you need and want you expect them to know how to use, you might get people step up to it that don't have experience enough in the total area of your project when asking for it all at once.

Maybe listing things people can step up to and a outline of what they're experience would have to be, this one requires C coding and knowledge of our version control system, we could use a forum moderator, or someone to manage our content management system running our website and has experience with drupal.
What type of documenting do you need to see written? API documenation for
your new scripting interface?
that would require C/C++ coding skills and familiarity with the code base.
Restricting what you need by skillset required.
To be fair a few of the things you needed you were very clear on, but that
does go back to the my opinion about it not being in the topic heading, and tl;dr and the topic being hidden from sight.

Atleast your working with a development community that has actually visited a forum at all, but I still don't think a lot saw the post about assisting in development, maybe my cynicism is from dealing with a more lazy community that just want to game after work, and don't want to take place in managing at all.

Maybe I'm completely off base here, though I know you requested someone to step up and be that the community contributor cordinator, if you lay that out you might find one of the people steps into that once you get the ball rolling.

dreyeth

Sat, 2014-11-22 03:00

Do you have anything that needs getting done for someone that doesn't have development skills yet, but knows enough to grab the svn version and build it?

I'm running Arch linux as my main system.

tomaszg

Sat, 2014-11-22 19:21

I'm not jcf, but you could prepare that updated bundle of themes and test them out.

Another idea from the top of my head: MOC forum only recently got new subfora, so it is possible that many interesting threads can be still buried in "General discussion". So browsing for anything that should be moved to other sections would help (especially for "contrib" threads). Same thing goes with "FAQ" section on the webpage. It is seriously outdated. So you can think of any question that should be added (and answered) there.

dreyeth

Sat, 2014-11-29 21:42

I'll probable look into the themes shortly once my holiday shopping is over.

Tomaszg are you the same guy that used to do those unofficial windows 2000 rollup packs?

dreyeth

Sat, 2014-11-29 22:01

Ok for the FAQ anyway how about what is mocmaint?

Is it mocmaint a.t daper d.ot net, as in a email address?

Is it your bug tracker?

Is it your mailing list and archive?

I assume its abrevation of moc mainter, so probable its a email address?

Its referenced all the time is a reply to place for development contributions, but I couldn't find any info on it in [moc.daper.net].

Never mind finally found it under the contact heading.

tomaszg

Sat, 2014-11-29 23:27

Nope, never tried to compile MOC on Windows.

jcf

Sat, 2014-11-22 20:03

From time to time I have things of a non-techinical nature which need to be researched. If that is of interest to you then e-mail me at mocmaint and let me know.

dreyeth

Tue, 2014-12-09 04:25

I'm not sure what you have in mind, even though I'm just starting scripting, tech is still my strength in the end.
I'm not really a master of anything, but I know a lot about many things in general.
I'm going to go through a lot of those themes soon.