[Devel] Some status updates, and a forum

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey OpenHatch Devel members,

It's July. Hitting the end of July.

Here are some updates on how things are progressing:

* John Stumpo and I have done a fair bit of work on the missions
  (mostly John)

* Jack Grigg has done a lot of work on the bug tracker importers
  (and I've reviewed his patches and improved them here and there)

* I've been working on setting up a forum.

A forum!? you cry. Let me explain.

The point of OpenHatch is to help people get involved in open source
projects. I want to hear from people how that's progressing for them.

I also want to get more feedback on what people do and don't like about
the site.

We have a general discussion list for OpenHatch that's listed at
http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss but we don't really
have much discussion going on there. So I'm going to set up a web forum
that *bridges* that list to the web. That way, people who like forums
can talk on the web, and people who like email can talk by email.

I'm going to set up FUDForum for that. I figure web people's first posts
to the forum should be moderated so we make sure they're reasonable before
we spread them all over the email list and archives.

Once it's all ready, I plan to add a big banner to the top of the site
explaining that we want more discussion.

What do you guys think?

And would any of you guys like to moderate discussions there?

I think that one of the really exciting topics that will come up, again
and again, is "I submitted a patch for this bitesize bug, but no one replied!"
from people. I think that's okay. I think that we'll need a bunch of friendly
people to help these people become valuable contributors to free software
projects.

Hopefully I'll get this forum running by this weekend. And then
I'm going to be at Debconf in NYC for the first week of August.

Maybe I'll see some of you there?

!

(-:,

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Q:	Why did the germ cross the microscope?
A:	To get to the other slide.