[tasklist-idea] Re: GNU task list management

[toby cabot]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 12:15:22PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> I wasn't aware of address@hidden  In practice, is that handled
> by different people than address@hidden  

There's a lot of that going around!  It appears as if the people on
the front end of the task list and the people on the back end
(i.e. the people who added tasks and the people who directed
volunteers to those tasks) weren't aware of one another.  So the
volunteer coordinators took it upon themselves (myself) to move the
tasklist to Savannah.  The rationale for that is that Savannah now
hosts almost 2000 projects and more than 20000 registered users.  Each
of those projects can add their own task "help wanted" items
independently, so this is a much more decentralized solution for
existing projects that need help.  I much prefer having each project
describe what they want than having one central list of stale items
that someone asked for in the early 90's but nobody remembers today.

There's another need, though: projects that need to happen but don't
currently exist, i.e. Free SOftware that people need but that nobody's
working on at the moment.  So we created the tasklist project on
Savannah as a proxy for those tasks.  We're in the process now of
going through the old tasklist items and pruning the ones that have
been filled, which is quite a few.  We'll always have a need for a
place to keep ideas and the tasklist project seems to be working well.
I don't have hard numbers but it feels as if I get more volunteers
from Savannah than I used to get from the old tasklist.  And that's
while we still have some links to the old tasklist that need to be
fixed.

Jose, who watches the tasks@ list, found out about the tasklist
project and suggested that we help each other, so now we're trying to
figure out how to work together.  Jose's now an administrator on the
tasklist project so he can add job postings, news items, etc.  At one
point we talked about forwarding tasks@ to tasklist-idea@ but I'm not
sure whether that's been done.  The idea behind tasklist-idea is to
have a place where a group of volunteers can take incoming program
ideas and filter them to see if e.g. there's already a program that
does what the user needs.