This is a spin-off of the Where is Nokia... thread

Executive summary: Do you want to improve this community? Then choose one project and become a regular contributor. Without this step, posting more in web forums like this will barely help.

I don't know if overlaps and gaps are the essential problem and I'm not sure whether management is the solution to whatever is the problem.

In a Sunday morning and 100% with my community shirt, for me a problem is the amount of community energy just wasted in threads where everyone seems to have an opinion about the things that are out of their reach (and actually their deep knowledge). In the meantime, issues within a reach for concrete contributions and change remain open or even unnoticed.

The advice I got when I started getting involved in free software projects was to concentrate on a couple of topics and help out there until getting something done. Sounds simple? It's damn though. But so gratifying every time you succeed.

Here in ITt there are plenty of discussions going on but how much of this talk ends up in some kind of fruitful improvement? Everyone: look your last 10 posts. Look also to random posts you wrote 3, 6, 12 months ago. Reach your own conclusions.

Overlaps. What is the problem with overlaps. Make your choice and help your preferred project improve and prevail. If there are nasty frictions highlight them. Choose one and help fix it.

Gaps. Which gaps? Be precise in use cases and concentrate your energies in those most relevant to you. Find the closest project(s) and help covering/porting the features needed. Or create a new project if needed (although with 763 projects only in garage.maemo.org and plenty of stuff in the free software community you may suspect not being the first one having that great idea and trying to do something about it).

Management? These projects need help! Being no coder is not an excuse. Testing, ideas, mockups, promotion, documentation, user support... and above all continuous support and regular commitment in the smallest tasks. All this leading to tangible results being reflected in new versions with increased download rates and more happy users.

Next time you feel like telling to a corporation how to do business, how to design devices, how to make technology selections, how to launch products, how to watch the competition... think it twice. I'm not saying you are wrong: it's just an invitation to consider where are your skills and energies better invested. Maybe in the meantime there is a single developer of a piece of software you actually like, needing much more your attention and your time.

What reward does the person get for doing something? I'm not talking about monetary, possessions etc but rather : https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3519#c21

A community member has made a feature for Nokia, which Nokia couldn't be arsed to do for themselves for diablo, with the result that it will never be included officially into diablo (despite the code being more stable than some of the other **** Nokia has put out. Modest, anyone?) and the usual response of "wait for Fremantle".

Well, this isn't really accurate (and isn't really on-topic for the thread—we're talking about community projects, not Nokia projects we don't have influence over), as the patches exist thanks more to Nokia than to the community.

I was talking about helping small community projects... but anyway.

Ask the people who contributed to those patches what were the gratifications and rewards today. Ask them again in one year time. I'm sure all them feel rewarded in one way or another.

About the patch rejected I have nothing to add to what Eero, myself and others commented in your link.

About the feature itself, let's look it from the overlaps/gaps perspective:

- There was a gap, and the community effort done around this patch covered it. Now it can be used for Diablo community editions. Good!

- There is also an overlap, since Maemo SW covered that feature for Fremantle. The code itself can't be the same for many reasons. The community code goes for Diablo community and the Nokia code goes for Fremantle official. Overlap solved? Users happy?

Post #2 is bollocks in this thread, I don't think those points are not valid but I do not think this thread would serve well by making it a discussion for #2. I apologise for posting #2 in this thread because it's not fair to derail the original topic described in the long post which qgil took time to write.

Yes, this thread is about community projects and I apologise for bringing an outside topic in. I'm willing to delete #2 but I'm not a ***** so I don't see the point in covering my mistake.

This is not to say that I agree with Nokia's decision regarding the bug but it does not serve well to discuss it here.

PS, qgil, I do appreciate your taking the time to give reasons as to why Nokia can't do something.

Diablo only gets bugfixes (often, not even security fixes).

Look at it from this angle: feature enhancement should not be applied to Stable. Its for Testing. Diablo is Stable. Fremantle is Testing. Mer is Testing (but different distribution).

It is very difficult (and expensive) to test features like this in order to be good enough for release. What if there is a chance of 1/10000 a bug gets triggered crashing the X server? Many Diablo users would not like that. Therefore, those who want to live on the edge can use Mer. But Nokia assumes the user only uses the official Nokia repositories, and uses the tablet for mission critical work. They have to; its their reputation. Same for SSU. These cannot take into account deep changes. So, what you want to do is protect users who do not have the ability to understand advanced changes to be able to apply advanced changes. You can do this by making it a bit harder to apply the advanced changes, and informing them of the side effects (but not impossible; that implies a vendor lock-in). For example, some 'hacks' apply text settings in /usr but this is potentially dangerous causing regressions.

So, in other words: your point is completely valid but not for the official Nokia distribution; its for Fremantle or a 3rd party distribution such as Mer.

It's funny that you bring up this topic, because I too have noticed a downturn in the number of people willing to contribute to any kind of project at all. It could be that we have the same number of contributors as before, but a bigger user base (thus making it appear like less are contributing by skewing percentages) and/or more projects which ultimately thin out that already narrow contributor base.

Honestly, it could be either. But I'm also seeing an uptick in the number of people who want something in return for their hard work, and not just a pat on the back and a little recognition anymore. Heck, I'm almost to the point of having to offer cash payments for articles and other stuff from members in order to get people to contribute to my site. I doubt I ever will, as that destroys the exact FOSS principles I'm fighting so hard to maintain, but in general I'm seeing that across the board.

It might also be the economic downturn causing people to be a bit more stingy with their resources too. When times are good, people give freely. When they're bad, you need a crowbar just to pry a penny out of their hands. *rolls eyes*

Either way, something needs to happen as far as contributions go. I contribute anywhere I can, and while my skills don't typically lay in the coding field, I do find lots of things I can do. One project I'm involved in for example is Floss Manuals. It's a great project, but it doesn't require coders, as it's simply a documentation project. But that's fine. Those are needed too.

Many community projects, and specially those headed with a single developer or two, don't make things easy for potential contributors either. This is a problem known in the free software community.

Proposal: once you ave decided to which project you want to give a hand go there and try to find a task to do without asking them, looking at their website, wiki, bug tracker, roadmap, mailing list archives... If you find a "Get Involved" or a list of open tasks, excellent. If not, probably the guys are too busy and looking not much beyond their releases. Consider starting helping them by putting a Get Involved page in place.

there are different levels of participation to any project.
If I spot a bug in something I use often and think I can solve it I have a go, but on the whole there is a high barrier to entry due to the sheer amount of knowledge required for anything more than a trivial app.

You need to learn the libraries and get the correct expected development chain configured and get into the mindset and intent of the original developer.

Its *hard* to get involved in a project which explains why so many apps end up stagnating and dying due to bitrot once the original visionary leaves.

I am paid in the daytime to manage and maintain a whole set of applications and keep them ticking and slot new features into the existing framework, but as with many jobs I was not useful for many months simply because I did not know everything required.

A person will not sit down and gain a xenlike knowledge of anything without strong personal motivation (monetary or otherwise) so why expect different here?

A lot of the problems are solved if instead of trying to be the Master of Every Topic in 1001 discussions you stick to a couple of projects contributing there something that has to do with your skills.

If you are a user with attention to details and you like liqbase go and concentrate there, bugging lcuk pervasively not accepting easy eacuses from him.

Giving a shot to the app in 1h, commenting in a thread on ITt about your first impressions, telling the authors why they should prioritize that great feature you came up with and then vanish forever (while reappearing tomorrow doing the same on another app) brings almost nothing. Only noise and some % of non-satisfaction to the developers.

I was just reading yesterday that user saying that FBreader is great but without autoscrolling is just crap, the developers have no clue what users want and please hurry hurry tell me another app doing just that. Well, this isn't useful. Instead, it would be better asking what is the problem with autoscrolling (maybe it implies a lot of recoding, maybe the maintainers just don't see the point yet) or asking why it is low priority and what would be needed to push it up. And chase the thing until you get one day FBreader with autoscrolling. Because you pushed it and helped making it happen.

This is rewarding.