Simon's Developer notes: On the importance of communication
Yesterday we had a pretty interesting developer conference call, which was basically about the issue that only a very small team is currently developing on Lightning and Sunbird (basically just three people), that it is hard to reach community expectations with regards to bugfixes and feature work with so small a team and what would be necessary to attract more outside developers.
From my point of view one of our shortcomings in the past has been on the communication front. With that I don't mean the communication between different people on certain bug characteristics or code issues (that works great), but the communication between the calendar project and our community.
Currently our channels of communication are:
- This blog, which just gets a post every one to two weeks with a bug fix status update
- our developer and support newsgroups (mozilla.dev.apps.calendar and mozilla.support.calendar), which are not exactly buzzing with activity
- IRC, which not many people are watching
The result - at least as far as I see it - is that
- the core people from the project come across as a closed circle to which it is hard to get in to (the opposite is true)
- what's going on in the project is not exactly transparent. Instead I would call it opaque.
So what can we do to improve our situation, to make the project more transparent, to raise the interest in the project and by that to gain more outside contributors? A few things come to my mind:
- We need to talk more about what we are doing. Therefore every core contributor will try to commit himself to at least blog about various stuff at least once a week from now. These posts will probably range from developer-oriented topics (interesting or disgusting pieces of code, recent bugfixes, UI considerations, QA problems/successes/challenges) and project-related topics (PR issues, community relations, ...) to basically anything that the people find worthwhile to blog about. In my opinion a great example to follow here is the Firefox community. Where nearly everybody involved in the project (developers, build engineers, QA staff, PR and marketing people, management) tries to blog regularly about various Firefox stuff or other stuff that interests them. The outside image that this creates is the image of a beehive, where everybody is doing lots of stuff to improve Firefox and in my opinion stuff like this also attracts outside people, because everybody would like to contribute to a project that is alive and well instead of a project that is stalling or dead.
- We need to raise the awareness of the project in the outside world. I'll try to contact a few people to get some press contacts, in the hope to do some interviews with some people interested in open source. We hope that this will raise the awareness of Lightning and Sunbird and bring in outside contributors.
