Re: [libreplanet-discuss] [fossil-users] [OT] Who's interested in project management & collaboration tools? And...

[Michal Suchanek]

On 6 August 2012 19:21, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

> Michal Suchanek wrote:

>> >From the startup side - with like 3 people on the project the
>> contribution of some software for project organization is questionable
>> at best. The overall attitude is geared towards doing stuff, not
>> managing stuff.
>>
>> >From the free software side - the number of people on any given
>> project is limited to like 5. Most projects either have no more major
>> contributors or naturally decompose into multiple parts where the
>> number of people involved in any given part is very low. eg. the Linux
>> kernel has subsystems, ...
>> Very few people are major contributors to more than 1-2 projects at a
>> time.
>>
>> To organize an IRC session of 3-6 people is not overly difficult, and
>> given the nature of typical FS schedule model of "done when done"
>> there is no real press. The problem seems to lie more in lack of time
>> and contributors than in organizing contributors.
>
>
> My personal observation has been that even with a tiny group, an email
> containing a list of action items very quickly yields a thread of dozens, or
> hundreds of follow-ups - requests for details, Q&A, status updates, nagging,
> ..... - and sorting through all that info is a real pain and time sink, not
> to mention confusing.

Yes, that's what IRC is good for. You get much of the details, Q&A,
and whatnot sorted out in real time before you start writing a
document, and only few revisions are needed to finish then. Also for
status updates that are not obvious as bugs closed or patches pushed.

And if you meant that email is bad for TODO list it definitely is.
Sane people use a text file tracked in vcs with project code or a wiki
page or an issue tracker. Unlike email all these media tend to persist
in the same place and are not pushed away by more recent messages.

Another horrible issue tracking tool used by some projects is web
forum software which leads to almost as much confusion as email except
the messages are editable so there is some chance that you can get
current summary at the start of thread.

When some people pick on obviously wrong tool for the job and insist
on using it they are doomed and there is nothing you can do about it.

>
> Now if that first message was "smarter" - so that responding updated the
> original (like editing a wiki page by email) - a lot of the pain and
> confusion would go away.

I think google tried something like that with Wave ;-)

>
>>
>> Note that most wikis are versioned, and some can use a vcs as backend
>> directly. So more permanent stuff not part of documentation that is
>> not to be fished in irc logs and mail archives typically ends up on a
>> wiki or a developer blog.
>
>
> That nicely captures what I'm trying to accomplish.  In a sense, TiddlyWiki
> meets Fossil-SCM built on HTML5 and a P2P protocol is kind of what I'm
> trying to achieve.

Fossil is almost but not quite such a wiki. It has built in wiki that
is not versioned, and versioned documents that are not editable
through the fossil web UI. If you modified fossil to make the
versioned documents editable you can use the clone and autosync
features to propagate changes.

Thanks

Michal