Perhaps I am confused. If this project is then so organized, why is there no apparent direction? Mailing lists, at least to me, seem quite a disorganized way of attacking the problem of information dissemination and retention. The reason I suggest forums is that you can contain both canon and discussion within a single organizational unit. Persons who are interested in only a subset of those organizational units need not plow through/organize/search the myriad of discussions which occur here. Further, by containing canon with the discussion people can know what has actually been decided, versus what the last thing said in a discussion was, which may not be an actual decision (and from what I have heard here about people making suggestions but not running with them, this is often the case.) I'm not a big fan of over-organization, but there are common-sense, low cost steps which can be taken to facilitate a cohesive development strategy. The wiki is a joke, honestly, as it's really just a collection of bullet points with no one having bothered to distill or synthesize the ideas into a plan of any sort. If the group is really too lazy to bother to log into a forum (you know, add a bookmark to your browser, it will remember who you are, just click it and you are logged in) then may I humbly suggest that the group may not have what it takes to really reinvigorate the game to the level which you have professed to desire. It's a serious task which is proposed, and even though we are part-time developers on it does not mean we should be lazy about doing what is needed to pursue that goal in earnest. My goal here is to provide a means for organization and a mechanism by which the leader(s) of it can communicate the actual plan and have that plan be readily available to all developers who will be referring to it during their development process. Having a single point of access for discussion and decisions means there is no need to know about mailing lists, wikis and docs in source control as separate potential locations of information - it's all in one place, easily found, easily searched, and if people are doing their jobs, mostly up to date (and if the conversations are included in the forums, then even out-of-date information can be corrected by review.) How far are you willing to go to bring this game to that huge pool of potential players? -----Original Message----- From: netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org [mailto:netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of James Cameron Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 5:29 PM To: Netrek Development Mailing List Subject: Re: [netrek-dev] Set a fitting subject On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 08:11:26AM -0700, ChronosWS wrote: > May I then suggest we set up a forum, [...] I use this mailing list. It is a forum. It has a web archive. If you want a separate mailing list for authenticated pontificating, that would mean people would have to look somewhere else. I like mailing list because it all comes to me and I don't have to log in anywhere. > where the devs can log in, [...] Log in to read mail? Count me out. ;-) That's an access barrier. > throw down > their ideas and have them discussed. When a decision is arrived at, collect > it into the official document so people can read what the current canon is. We have official documents in the source control repositories of each subproject, client, server, metaserver. We also have Wiki pages. That doesn't make them official though, there is no central government yet. > For my own project, we do a lot of brainstorming in IM during the day. He > then posts the IM to the forums so we have a complete record of how we > arrived to the decision. Yes, we've been doing that already. We use instant messaging over the IRC protocol, server irc.freenode.net, channel #netrek. Several of us log it. The logs find their way into change control comments or Wiki, or this forum. > us and keeps things pretty well organized without going overboard on having > a bunch of Word or OO docs running around. If it can't be expressed in text, there has to be a problem in how it is conveyed. > I can set up a forum for this on my co-lo box if people are interested in > it. Unfortunately, that box does not have properly configured email > services, so it can't do nice things like notify you when posts have changed > and whatnot. > > Is this something the group would be interested in? Thanks for the offer, but no, I'm not interested in that. If you think there is a target group that won't use mail but will use forums, you could set up a forum mirror of this mailing list, such that all posts to it appear in your forum, and all posts to the forum appear as threaded replies in the mailing list. As long as it doesn't break and spew mail everywhere, that would be fine. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/ _______________________________________________ netrek-dev mailing list netrek-dev at us.netrek.org http://mailman.us.netrek.org/mailman/listinfo/netrek-dev