Re: [phpGroupWare-developers] Sad thing

[Alan Langford]

On 2007 02 19 13:35, Chris Weiss wrote:
> <much good stuff />

I have spent a lot of time looking at various open source software 
projects. It is interesting that there seems to be little correlation 
between the quality of the code, the number of people using the 
software, and the health of the community that surrounds it. There are 
poorly coded projects with many contributors, popular and well-written 
products with no contributors, and everything in between.

One difference between a "surviving" project and a "vibrant" project is 
that the vibrant ones have a very open attitude, some people who are 
willing to evangelize the project, and an active community of "givers".

I don't know how many users phpGW has, but I bet it's a lot more than 
one would guess by looking at what's online. There are some things that 
can be done to change this. Some effort on promotion is required. Even 
OpenOffice asks users who register to answer how they're going to 
support the project. I think it's a good thing to tell people that the 
code is "free"  because people give to it freely.

Three overworked developers doesn't make for a happy project when it's 
as big as phpGW. What the project needs is one or more "people persons" 
with some technical skills who can start up some forums, build a mailing 
list for site administrators, encourage people to put "I love 
phpGroupWare" banners on their sites, launch some market research on 
desired features, and to ask people how they can contribute when they 
download. This is all work that's not related to the actual code. [I 
don't know if this is heresy or not, but you might consider using code 
from other projects (a CMS like Joomla, forums, etc.) to kick start a 
supportive community.] Once there's a active community in place, you're 
much more likely to find people who can make significant contributions 
to code, documentation, quality and testing, translation, and more.

Unfortunately, I just use the code for personal purposes; I haven't 
encountered a client who needed to use it, so it's never been a 
"mainstream" project for me. If it was, I'd be contributing. As far as 
I'm concerned, it's a responsibility to try to give back where you can, 
not just an option.