[feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

Jeff_K · 2006-02-26 18:31:18

Thanks for this discussion—especially Sencer’s posts above. I think this has been very positive, and the three suggestions posted above by David are good ones.

I came to Textpattern (like many) with the release of 4.0. I was drawn to the software for a number of reasons: 1) I knew and respected Dean’s work through <a href=“http://textism.com”>Textism</a> 2) I saw a number of people in the web community who I also respected like John Hicks and Drew McLellan using and plugging Textpattern and 3) (and most relevant for the discussion here) I saw the strength and growth of the Textpattern community itself.

If I have concerns about “whether Textpattern is on track” they are mainly driven by my ignorance of what is going on behind the scenes. I come to these boards several times a week, but never get a full sense of where things are headed, or what help is needed by the Devs. The fact that I am an avid user of the software (and a total software update junkie) and don’t still have a clue exactly what Textpattern “crockery” entails is a good sign that other members of the community might also be in the dark about the future of the software. (I suspect Crockery is the name (?) of the next version? Scheduled to include nested sections and ??).

Textpattern’s strength (and what originally drew me here) is the talent of the people working on and using the project. I sense that this is also what the posters above has identified as a key obsticle to its further development. Changes like a monthly newsletter (or updates to Textpattern.com) might give the community a sense of what is in the works (and what help is needed). Events like a template competition get lost in the dozens of posts that go up on these boards. A DEV board on the forums would also be helpful for rallying the troops more effectively.

Although it made me a bit nervous at first, I think this discussion is entirely healthy, and one that needs to be had.

Last edited by Jeff_K (2006-02-26 18:38:09)

hakjoon · 2006-02-27 00:28:15

Skubidu wrote:
Number 3 would be some kind of newsletter, I suppose.

I actually thought the fairly regular posting that was going on in the development weblog was a perfect form of communication. It revs up around releases and simmers down between them. If you look at the archive you will notice the activity was pretty good through January with it slowing down some in February but that is bound to happen, as other items get in the way. Maybe it doesn’t seem to be an official newsletter just some regular stories on the main site, which already happens.

I would also love to see some of the community activities reported on in the official site. The recent meet up in Utrecht for example would have been great. Also write ups on new sites that are being rolled using Textpattern with maybe some details on teh building process (almost like a postmortem) These are things that I think could help bring the community even more together in the guise of official communication.

I think all of these items could be submitted by the community (not requiring any core team work other then maybe posting the articel) . If you look at the Drupal frontpage not that much of it is about the software but about the community.

Ok now I’m babbling.

Anark · 2006-02-27 02:31:03

It would be pretty hard, I think, to define the role of a “moderator” — what would the scope of that job be? What would the tasks be? What powers and privileges would be invested in that job? Who grants those powers and privileges by what authority? Unless you answer those questions you risk creating a Chief Busibody Officer who’s going to be more hindrance than help.

Let me flog the community map idea some more: it’d be a three-tiered thing, with the topmost tier showing all the different Efforts: sites, projects, groups, each with a very short description. Click on any of them and you get to the second tier: a more detailed presentation: past achievements, future aims, present state of play, the toys being played with and tools being tooled with, who’s involved in what capacity and who’s in charge of the Effort. Then, clickable from the second tier, the third tier would be bio pages with information on who these people are, what they’re doing, which Efforts they’ve been contributing to, and how they can be contacted.

Not strictly necessary, but maybe an interesting design challenge: the upper two tiers could be done visually, say the top tier as a Map of TextLand with DevCity as the capital and all the other Efforts as cities. The cities, second tier, could be rendered as subway maps, each station representing a contributor, different subway lines representing different aspects of the work done. Fanciful. Whatever.

Whereas a moderator would be appointed to engage in hard-to-define social engineering, the mapmaker would be appointed to perform a well-defined task: describe what’s there, keep it up to date, maybe run a blog about new developments; maybe prod people every now and then to update their stuff, but don’t “moderate”, arbitrate or interfere in any way — just provide the clarity that will help the community go about its business on its own.

zem · 2006-02-27 02:47:11

A contrarian view:

146 posts in, and I still haven’t seen a clear explanation of what the problem is, or what all these proposed solutions are intended to achieve.

Generally (and with apologies to those for whom this is unfair), the people who contribute the most to Textpattern, don’t spend much time talking about it, organizing subcommittees, or posting announcements. An enourmous amount of work has happened on translations, documentation, code, testing, debugging, patching, themes, plugins, and work behind the scenes, with little fanfare or discussion. So much so, that the most ubiquitous complaint is that there is too much action, not enough talk (!)

Many of the suggestions sofar seem to duplicate things that already exist. There are already forums, mailing lists, wikis, portals and so on for documentation, plugins, themes and code. Some of the issues raised here are already answered in the FAQ or on TextBook. We have already asked for volunteers to help with testing, and to investigate and specialize in certain areas.

Please, don’t insult those who have spent time and effort building resources for Textpattern, by pretending that they don’t exist; or, worse, that the thing that is lacking is a steering committee. Spend your time and energy adding to and improving those things, not discussing the selection process for the committee to appoint members of the team to design the process to request a form for approval to submit a request to fix an error on the Wiki. (Exercise a little self-analysis here: are you really trying to get things done, or are you just trying not to feel left out?)

To those who contribute, or are thinking about it, I offer thanks and encouragement. And just one piece of advice. Don’t fall into the trap of inventing new hurdles for yourself: committees, Official Approval, meetings and the like. Nobody ever got more done by implementing a bureaucracy first.

neutrino · 2006-02-27 03:30:09

Wow Zem, you did warn us, contrarian. I don’t think anyone was intending to insult anyone else here. There was a perception of an elephant in the room. I know you know that the role of the ivory tower programmer is dead, moved to India, right? There are hundreds of people who post to this forum. Sorry but when societies grow they need different kinds of organizational mechanisms than they did when they were small. TXP isn’t a little tribe anymore. Mankind wouldn’t have come up with “governing” if it wasn’t neccessary. It doesn’t have to be hierarchical or bureaucratic—it can be consensus but then that won’t work if someone is hanging on hard to something. I don’t know you all well enough to know who that might be, if that might be. I do know that the (regular) people on the forum are trustworthy and I believe well-intentioned. There’s always going to be some friction/tension between coders, programmers, artists, users, designers, hacks, visionaries; everybody has different issues, different questions, different goals.

Also I have big issues with “just do it, don’t talk about it”. That’s George W’s philosophy and look where it’s got us!

@Anark—I love the subway map idea. That would be so cool!

Last edited by neutrino (2006-02-27 03:30:37)

zem · 2006-02-27 03:47:35

C’mon, don’t make me paraphrase Animal Farm.

But, seriously: what problem are you trying to solve? Building a bureacracy, or government, or whatever you want to call it, shouldn’t be an end in itself. What are the desired outcomes? Is the lack of bureacracy the real impediment, or is it that no one is willing or able to do the work?

Regardless of intentions, I can tell you that there are valuable Textpattern contributors who are frustrated and insulted at seeing their efforts being ignored or discarded.

ramanan · 2006-02-27 03:48:15

Two things:

1.

I think the community spirit here now hasn’t changed for the worse since I started using TxP back in the early part of 2004. I think it’s silly to remember 2004 as some golden age of Textpattern — because it wasn’t. For starters, Dean was rarely found in the forum by the middle of 2004, if I recall correctly. Also, feature requests and the like weren’t really resolved in a timely manner till all the new programmers jumped on board. Things are better now I would say. I find I rarely need to reply to a “how do I …” question anymore because by the time I’ve read a question it’s been answered 2 or 3 times over. The bulk of my posts here were all made back when far fewer people able to answer questions on Textpattern; now there are countless experts in the forum.

Also, if you read the plugin forum, you’ll see that many plugins are made in response to user requests for features. I think about half the plugin’s i’ve written were at the behest of someone else. I mean, I don’t use most of the plugins I’ve written. (This was true of the Import Script that I wrote before one was included with Textpattern 4.0. I didn’t need it, someone else did, so I just wrote it.)

And it’s clear that people who can’t code are also contributing to the documentation at textbook and textpattern.org.

And all this is being done without any committees in place. Shocking I know.

2.

Zem’s comment sums up my feelings on this thread. I still don’t see what people are worrying about in this thread. Can people point to specific failures of the way things are currently being done? (This thread is long, have I missed this?)

soulship · 2006-02-27 04:40:42

I have been trolling this post for days wondering the same thing as Ramanan.

Textpattern is off-track? I missed that memo. When will my website stop working?

I didn’t know that anything was broken. There have been more productive releases in the last 6 months than most open source software sees in a year. I feel as if txp is thriving. I think things are cyclical here as in everything else. When I started using this software I had never had any experience with php mysql or css html and through this forum alone I muddled through and learned what was going on and how the platform worked. I would have been envied to have all of the resources there are now. I’m sure everyone remembers this. ;) That was all there was a little over a 14months ago. I think things have been rolling along nicely. We’ve got a textbook going, textgarden, and .org. There are tons of people contributing templates and code in the way of plugins. Everyone has time in spurts and people drift in and out, but it seems to me when someone has time to participate they do, and slowly things have been getting hashed out. I for one have not been worried about the future of txp. It is simply the most agile piece of software out there for web publishing. You can make it do anything. Just look at some of datafirms posts in the show us yours section of the forum. Lets all remember that this is free go to the .com and download the latest release. No one will ask you for money. I don’t want to be glib, but everything looks sunny on my side of the street. I haven’t been here heavily since December, so I’ll have to scan through posts and see what I missed.

Last edited by soulship (2006-02-27 04:41:48)

davidm · 2006-02-27 08:43:05

zem wrote: 146 posts in, and I still haven’t seen a clear explanation of what the problem is, or what all these proposed solutions are intended to achieve.

I think we’ve tried to make concrete propositions, and the ultimate goal of those proposition can’t be made clearer (anyway, I can’t make it clearer if Alex or Nils can, please help me there).

Let’s recap the actions and the why :

1. Action : Extend the project Team to other areas than development => Why : Allocate resources more efficiently, allow dev team to focus on dev work

2. Action : Create a project team board on the forums => Why : Coordinate efforts between Textpattern’s contributors, Help contributors to have a clear view of development process (which in turn means they can communicate with the community).

3. Action : Have a montly users mailing list newsletter => Why : Give users an overview of what gets done and what is planned (not talking roadmap here, but general orientations).

(More explanations here)

Generally (and with apologies to those for whom this is unfair), the people who contribute the most to Textpattern, don’t spend much time talking about it, organizing subcommittees, or posting announcements. An enourmous amount of work has happened on translations, documentation, code, testing, debugging, patching, themes, plugins, and work behind the scenes, with little fanfare or discussion.

Yeah well, maybe I should feel targeted here, but I don’t. The community can speak their mind if they feel such is the case, I’ll “turn off the sound” then :P

Many of the suggestions sofar seem to duplicate things that already exist. There are already forums, mailing lists, wikis, portals and so on for documentation, plugins, themes and code. Some of the issues raised here are already answered in the FAQ or on TextBook. We have already asked for volunteers to help with testing, and to investigate and specialize in certain areas.

This has never been in question. The question is not that those things exist, just that loose coordination is not efficient and things could be made better, not by building a bureaucracy (again, depicting what we say in a caricatural way) but having some actual role distribution and basic communication channels.

Please, don’t insult those who have spent time and effort building resources for Textpattern, by pretending that they don’t exist; or, worse, that the thing that is lacking is a steering committee.

If I have insulted anyone in this way, I sincerely appologize. But I’ll do so one to one, with people themselves telling me that I have insulted them (forgive me if I don’t take your word for it).

About lacking a steering committee : if the majority is satisfied with the way things run and feel that we are raving lunatics craving for bureaucratic organisation, then I’ll sh*t up and do what I can given the current organisation. More probably than not, create the french support website.

For reference, I had asked Dean how he’d like me to go about it wether I could go ahead with it on my own (buying the fr-textpattern domain) or wait for coherent texpattern.com per-country subdomains (yeah, well of course I prefer discussing than imposing my point of view, that’s just me. And I am aware that coordination can be most beneficial to the project).

Spend your time and energy adding to and improving those things, not discussing the selection process for the committee to appoint members of the team to design the process to request a form for approval to submit a request to fix an error on the Wiki.

I won’t justify here, because I don’t think I need to.

(Exercise a little self-analysis here: are you really trying to get things done, or are you just trying not to feel left out?)

I don’t feel left out at all. I could get things done on my own. Would it really help though ? Without coordination my efforts could just go the opposite way of someone else’s. Or I could just be doing the same thing someone else is already doing. Or I could devote time and resources to something that is unimportant while other more important things could need my contribution.

Of course, I’d have no way of knowing what purpose what I am doing has. I guess that’s why team players in sports are better when they play together rather than along each other aiming whatever personnal goal they see fit. And of course, leadership can help along the way making a better team.

To those who contribute, or are thinking about it, I offer thanks and encouragement. And just one piece of advice. Don’t fall into the trap of inventing new hurdles for yourself: committees, Official Approval, meetings and the like. Nobody ever got more done by implementing a bureaucracy first.

Again witht the bureaucracy caricature !

I don’t think it describes what we are trying to achieve here…

zem wrote: Regardless of intentions, I can tell you that there are valuable Textpattern contributors who are frustrated and insulted at seeing their efforts being ignored or discarded.

Again : If I have insulted anyone in this way, I sincerely appologize. But I’ll do so one to one, with people themselves telling me that I have insulted them.

Last edited by davidm (2006-02-27 08:45:43)

Skubidu · 2006-02-27 09:13:11

@zem:

Generally (and with apologies to those for whom this is unfair), the people who contribute the most to Textpattern, don’t spend much time talking about it, organizing subcommittees, or posting announcements. An enourmous amount of work has happened on translations, documentation, code, testing, debugging, patching, themes, plugins, and work behind the scenes, with little fanfare or discussion. So much so, that the most ubiquitous complaint is that there is too much action, not enough talk (!)

I think it’s not about long discussions where are talking about: it’s about information (What are the devs doing? What are they planning?) and about coordination (Who is taking of…? Who can I talk to, if I’d like to help with this or that?).

Please, don’t insult those who have spent time and effort building resources for Textpattern, by pretending that they don’t exist; or, worse, that the thing that is lacking is a steering committee.

We didn’t want to insult anyone – and I think we made this clear earlier.
We all have been and are still spending much time in promoting, translating, helping, writing tutorials, doing support in our native languages. So why should we insult others doing similar things?

(Exercise a little self-analysis here: are you really trying to get things done, or are you just trying not to feel left out?)

Come on, we’re not sitting in a sandbox :o)

To those who contribute, or are thinking about it, I offer thanks and encouragement. And just one piece of advice. Don’t fall into the trap of inventing new hurdles for yourself: committees, Official Approval, meetings and the like. Nobody ever got more done by implementing a bureaucracy first.

We never proposed implementing a bureaucracy. I think it’s more about guidance – for those who are doing things and for those who like to do something. It’s all OpenSource but that’s not a reason why we can’t get more effective in our community.

Skubidu · 2006-02-27 09:33:02

@ramanan:

I think it’s silly to remember 2004 as some golden age of Textpattern—because it wasn’t.

I can’t remember having ever lived in a kind of golden age – so I don’t miss it. As I started using Textpattern things have been… let’s say “suboptimal”. There have been long discussions and finally a team of devs has been founded. So things got better, things are running quite good at some points – but there are things that are still… suboptimal!

And – by the way – we are not complaining about the community. We like to get more input from the community to the core (and that’s not always PHP coding or writing documentations).

Last edited by Skubidu (2006-02-27 09:37:09)

alexandra · 2006-02-27 09:50:48

@zem
zem wrote: Please, don’t insult those who have spent time and effort building resources for Textpattern

Dear zem, i regard myself as a ‘core’ contributer to TXP, feeling dedicated to the project, having spent countless hours to help people with TXP, building up the community and encouraging people to contribute or use TXP.

Here is my list

setting up the only german txp resource site
translated and organized translation (along with Nils) for germany
set up TXP Mag and keep it running
countless posts helping people on the boards in english and german!
organized christmas fundraising
organizing plugin development on a small scale but still..

I feel insulted by your post because you do not regard me to be a very strong contributor at all. I seem to be just someone who might have had insulted someone (btw. who?).
I feel angry about your post because you splitt something … people. I do not like that at all. I kindly ask you to stop that.

Last edited by alexandra (2006-02-27 09:55:02)

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#145 2006-02-26 18:31:18

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#146 2006-02-27 00:28:15

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#147 2006-02-27 02:31:03

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#148 2006-02-27 02:47:11

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#149 2006-02-27 03:30:09

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#150 2006-02-27 03:47:35

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#151 2006-02-27 03:48:15

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#152 2006-02-27 04:40:42

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#153 2006-02-27 08:43:05

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#154 2006-02-27 09:13:11

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#155 2006-02-27 09:33:02

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

#156 2006-02-27 09:50:48

Re: [feedback] How to bring txp back on track ? Let's debate !

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