[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Too busy to accept help?

[From: Jussi Kukkonen]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> The Maemo community is alive, but not thriving as much as it could. This
> is because the Nokia developers are so busy and are often unable to
> respond to the simplest of requests for changes or information, and
> often unable to even acknowledge that contributions have been accepted.
> It's OK to be busy, so this isn't a personal attack on those developers.
> It's a suggestion for how to take the weight off them.
> 
> I think Nokia needs to assign a dedicated community liaison, full time
> or part time, while still demanding that all developers are involved
> with the community as much as possible. 
...
> Nokia will get a lot of the advantages of open source if they don't do
> this, and the community will survive if they don't do this, but I think
> the extra salary would be a good investment to get even more valuable
> advantages.

Good suggestion, I second this. There are probably other solutions too.
Something that would go a long way is opening the development a little
more: I've been really trying to follow what's happening in maemo
development and have found it really difficult...
* None of the development discussions/meetings/decisions seem to happen
  in public
* The bugzilla doesn't seem to be actually used for bug tracking
* I still don't even know who works on what
The only way to follow anything seems to be maemo-commits.

It could of course be that I'm just slow -- it's a large project, and
I'm not that familiar with the components, after all. However, I have
succesfully gotten familiar with other large projects before. This time
I feel like I haven't progressed at all.

I understand that keeping design docs in the wiki or having development
discussions on public mailing lists or in IRC is more work and in some
cases impossible. I also understand that some employees might not want
to be 'in the public eye' and that some bugs need to be Nokia-only.
Still, doing things in private is going to keep everyone else in the
dark, and hinder community involvement... I fear one liaison won't help
that.


Best wishes to the developers -- don't burn yourselves on the release,
we'll need you after that too :)
-- 
Jussi Kukkonen
<jhkukkon at cc.hut.fi>