Over the last few months, we have run a number of workshops for package owners and committers. The sites we covered so far were London, Bangalore, Espoo, Tampere and Oulu. The workshops were either one day or half-day sessions and open to package owners and committers focussing on topics such as
- How to build communities
- How to contribute with Hg aka Mercurial
- Information on the Contribution Process
- How to use documentation to build communities
- How the foundation should evolve its infrastructure
If you are interested what was discussed and presented, check out the workshop pages on the wiki. The sessions were very interactive: lots of discussion took place, problems were raised and some subsequently resolved. Much of the discussion recently covered topics related to preparing for the EPL, something the foundation and it’s members are commited to complete. We made some progress on this with the kernel earlier this year. Earlier workshops covered how to get the most out of SEE.
Each package owner got a pledge card, to set herself goals for how to move forward. These were very popular: let me tell you most package owners have a few of the cards. I hope it will translate into package owners evangelizing there technologies more.
A big thanks to Nokia who hosted the workshops and Teleca, who hosted a big dinner after the Bangalore workshop. Also a big thanks to package owners.
It’s good to know this is going on.
Of course what I would really like to know is how much developer time is actually being used to do Foundation related work but we’re unlikely to ever know that.
Do we know yet whether it looks like the commiter policy is usually going to be everyone in a current development team or whether it will just be one person who commits for everyone else?
@David: I have some data on how much time is spent doing work such as evangelizing the technology. I won’t share these publicly as I have promised package owners that what is discussed will be kept private for now. Today, it is less than the average for successful open source projects, which is around 45%. But this is not entirely surprising.
I don’t know what the total of work related to the foundation is. If you try and put a price tag on what we get in terms of contributions on an ongoing basis, that must be big.
Committer policy: see http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Symbian_Collaboration_Processes/Selecting_Committers – Committers will NOT be EVERYBODY in a development team. Committer status has to be earned, and is already being earned – see http://blog.symbian.org/2009/12/07/meet-maximilian-odendahl-committer/. Some teams only have the package owner as committers, others have more.
Sometimes next year, we will move towards a committer election as is commonplace for open source projects.