LilyPond Grand Organization Project: motivation

[Graham Percival]

Project website: http://percival-music.ca/gop/
(includes these emails)

     LilyPond GOP - Motivation

Most readers are probably familiar with the LilyPond Grand
Documentation Project, which ran from Aug 2007 to Aug 2008. This
project involved over 20 people and resulted in an almost complete
rewrite of the documentation. Most of those contributors were
normal users who decided to volunteer their time and effort to
improve lilypond for everybody. By any measure, it was a great
success.

The Grand Organization Project will run from Jan 2009 to Aug 2009,
and aims to do the same thing with a larger scope -- instead of
focusing purely on documentation, the project aims to improve all
parts of LilyPond and its community. Just as with GDP, the main
goal is to encourage and train users to become more involved.

If you have never contributed to an open-source project before --
especially if you use Windows or OSX and do not know how to
program or compile programs -- then you may be wondering if
there's anything you can do. Rest assured that you can help. In
fact, one of our most valuable developers run windows, and I
haven't compiled lilypond in years.


     "Trickle-up" development

One of the reasons I'm organizing GOP is "trickle-up" development.
The idea is this: doing easy tasks frees up advanced developers to
do harder tasks. Or in other words: don't ask "am I the best
person for this job"; instead, ask "am I capable of doing this
job?".

For example, consider lilypond's poor handling of grace notes in
conjunction with clef and tempo changes. Fixing this will require
a fair amount of code rewriting, and would take an advanced
developer a few weeks to do. It's clearly beyond the scope of a
normal user, so we might as well sit back and do nothing, right?

No; we can help, indirectly. Suppose that our normal user starts
answering more emails on lilypond-user. This in turn means that
documentation writers don't need to answer those emails, so they
can spend more time improving the docs. Now, I've noticed that all
doc writers tackle harder and harder subjects, and when they start
writing docs on scheme programming and advanced tweaks, they start
contributing bug fixes to lilypond. Having people performing these
easy-to-moderate bug fixes frees up the advanced developers to
work on the really hard stuff... like rewriting the grace note
code.

Having 1 more normal user answering emails on lilypond-user won't
have a dramatic trick-up affect all by himself, of course. But if
we had 8 users volunteering to answer emails, 6 users starting to
write documentation, 4 users helping to redesign the website, and
2 users editing LSR... well, that would free up a lot of current
bug-fixing-capable contributors to focus on that, and we could
start to make a real dent in the number of bugs in lilypond. Quite
apart from the eased workload, having that many new helpers will
provide a great moral boost!

Please take a look at the Ongoing Jobs and Temporary Jobs. Most
jobs can be performed with nothing more than an email client, web
browser, and a bit of lilypond knowledge.

Cheers,
- Graham