Center members and Center Members only Forum

The open discussion of hosting, forum, web-sites, community organisation and open voting
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Ivan Denisov
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by Ivan Denisov »

ReneK wrote:Sadly, i have to agree. As I stated some time ago, we need a kind of a charta, including our goals, our raison-d'etre, and how we want to achieve those goals. Based on that, we can have statues, including roles. The roles then can be filled with actual people. Rushing forward without knowing where and why is a sure way into oblivion.
Let's do this. I have no knowledge about such tools, please, help if you can. But we need take into account that each job in this map better come from voting.
ReneK
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by ReneK »

Ivan Denisov wrote: Each job comes from discussion and voting. We are discussing the hosting for two weeks, there are time for voting.
No. It is not time to vote on that non-issue.

And no, what you quoted above is not all that was discussed about the "center" on the OMI Blackbox List.

Robert's mail was a reaction to my following email:
Just thinking aloud:

It seems that there is a Russian community that is thriving and active in developing the Blackbox framework and development environment. Then there is a German and English community of BB-using programmers. And then there are a few other users here and there.

To me, it seems that BB lacks three things:

1) Centralization
Currently, those who know about BB have different places to go, if they want to "get it": There's oberon.ch (but OMI stopped their engagement to BB), there's Zinnamturm (where you get lots of subsystems) and oberoncore.ru (where you get the newest BB release and I don't know what else because I do not read Russian). If there was ONE http://blackboxframework.org/ (for instance. it is free currently, and while balckbox.org is auctioned off at around 3000$, there is no auction for it) where you get it all, it would be easier to make BB known, thus growing the community - a core topic for any OpenSource project.

2) Internationalization
Would Linux be where it is now, if the documentation and the UI were only available in English? I guess not. It seems that most users and programmers of BB are not native speakers of English. If documentation, UI and website were available in different languages, this would go far in growing the community base.

3) Purpose
When Modula-2 hit the Amiga oh so many years ago, its impact was due to the fact that you could write good games in a very short time with it. It was easier to learn than C, and it was better suited to the task than AmigaBasic. And back then these were all the alternatives there were. What is the BB Framework better suited at than VisualStudio/.NET? I think that at least currently game programming with BB is no good (the main loop stops, if you keep a mouse-key pressed, for instance) and it is not Real Time applications - we all know why. While "all purpose" sounds fine, it is neither true nor is it something you can build a marketing strategy around. A vision of purpose could also go far in growing the community AND deciding the direction of future development of BB. A winning argument for BB in its starting days was portability. But then, the Apple BB got the boot, and Linux BB never really got started, so no portability at all nowadays. Werner Braun's O3 is a really great thing but would benefit from a larger dedicated community, too (in fact, I could see a web application server as a purpose for BB, especially if BB was ported to Linux. Ease of use AND being a bit uncommon and thus not so easy to attack is a good argument).

Anyhow, these things need the group to agree to do them, someone to take the lead and the group joining up for the effort.

Rene
And the discussion about what the center is and is not, kept on. OberonCore contributed some, and so did others. To say that Robert introduced a term and then discussion was abandoned is not a fair representation of facts.

If the role of the "center" is not defined clearly enough (and OberonCore, you and I seem to agree on this), then this is not the time to decide hosting, but the time for a serious discussion of what the center is, what it does, how it does that and so on.
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Ivan Denisov
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by Ivan Denisov »

The result of this discussion should be stored in any web page. We have no web-site to put their the information about "center" and so on. Maybe we should make Google Document for fixing their some text? The forum treads are difficult to analyse, it will be talk of few people only.

But the Google Document is not public enough...

The main "center" role is decide about BlackBox, but not about the hosting and CMS. We are skidding in a secondary questions... Can we make the decision about web-site and hosting without polishing the group roles? And fix all the new decisions in a new web-site?
ReneK
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by ReneK »

The main "center" role is decide about BlackBox, but not about the hosting and CMS. We are skidding in a secondary questions... Can we make the decision about web-site and hosting without polishing the group roles? And fix all the new decisions in a new web-site?
What part of "no" (as OberonCore and I repeatedly told you) did you not understand?
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Ivan Denisov
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by Ivan Denisov »

ReneK wrote:What part of "no" (as OberonCore and I repeatedly told you) did you not understand?
"No" is so much better than silence! Thank you guys :)

Where we will write the "center" description? Roles and so on?
martin_vahi
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by martin_vahi »

I understand that the time delay between my current post and the previous post is about 3 years. I do not know, where Your discussion has moved during those 3 years, but as a comment to this old thread I suggest that the participants distinguish between projects that are open to the world wide developer community and projects that are Your private projects that just happened to be open source. If You want Your project to be open to the world wide developer community, then locking other people out of discussions by creating closed forums or by using other means is certainly a very counter-productive thing to do. What regards to voting, then I emphasize that voting is fundamentally a last resort diplomatic measure, because the will of the people, who's choice differs from the winning choice, is overruled. In such a small group of people like the BlackBox developer community seems to be it should be possible to negotiate without voting.

Thank You for reading my comment.
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Ivan Denisov
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by Ivan Denisov »

martin_vahi wrote:I understand that the time delay between my current post and the previous post is about 3 years. I do not know, where Your discussion has moved during those 3 years, but as a comment to this old thread I suggest that the participants distinguish between projects that are open to the world wide developer community and projects that are Your private projects that just happened to be open source. If You want Your project to be open to the world wide developer community, then locking other people out of discussions by creating closed forums or by using other means is certainly a very counter-productive thing to do. What regards to voting, then I emphasize that voting is fundamentally a last resort diplomatic measure, because the will of the people, who's choice differs from the winning choice, is overruled. In such a small group of people like the BlackBox developer community seems to be it should be possible to negotiate without voting.
Thank you for this comment. After this three years I understood that the voting has the role of blocking of solutions which quality is not fit some standards or the features that deviating Oberon spirit. So now I can not imaging the development pipeline without voting.
Josef Templ
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Re: Center members and Center Members only Forum

Post by Josef Templ »

As Ivan mentioned, voting is the formalization of the review process.
It is about reviewing all changes before anything goes to master.
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