[Members] Voting criteria
Bart van Bragt
jabber at vanbragt.com
Wed May 11 05:47:11 CDT 2005
Ulrich Staudinger wrote:
> I have to admit that i do not doubt the democratic approach - it's by
> far the best approach to bring different opinions together.
Hmm, is it?
Just take a look at what's currently happening with the European
'constitution'... The people have to vote but they have absolutely no
clue what they are voting on. Besides that most democratic organisations
end up with a LOT of talk an no action. Linux, Psi, Firefox, all very
successful projects but they all have a very small number of people that
are in charge and who decides what does and what doesn't get into the
project.
IMO having a democratic project doesn't attract more developers. Your
project just needs to be popular, accessible (documentation, readable
code) and there needs to be strong leadership. Having something under
the JSF flag doesn't guaranteee any of these points.
You might not enjoy writing documentation (neither do I :D) but I know
that I really appreciate it if documentation is available. Imagine that
you are someone that's building an application that needs to be able to
communicate with other processes, or that you need to integrate IM
featuers in your software. Where would you start? What documentation
would you find? The current documentation for Jabber is either outdated
or not complete. Just pointing at the RFCs and the JEPs is not the way
to go IMO. IMO a lot can improve here which is also why I would welcome
more people to the JSF with a less technical background. People that are
good at marketing, copywriting, documenting, etc. It's really cool what
Peter is doing for jabber.org but the site is far from optimal in it's
current state. Making the XMPP/Jabber technology more accessible is
beneficial to us al, it makes sure that there is a very low threshold
for new users and new programmers. Much lower than it is today.
But I'm not sure if that is something for the JSF. Well, having a more
attractive jabber.org page would be nice. But besides that creating
documentation etc could very well be done outside of the JSF. Maybe we
should concentrate on the certification program anyway. That is
something where the JSF 'brand' could have extra value...
Bart
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