Let us face reality

Cees de Groot cg at cdegroot.com
Fri Jan 28 14:12:25 UTC 2005


On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:00:13 +0100, Alexander Lazarević  
<Alexander at lazarevic.de> wrote:

> I can't think of a community driven project where every member gets the  
> assurance, that his work will be included without any question.

Sure. But that's either always about small bits, or big bits that are  
usable anyway (for example, I'm investing a lot of time currently in  
learning wxSqueak and maybe I'll invest quite a bit of time in making it  
better - if wxSqueak never becomes mainstream, I don't care because I  
could make use of it). A full redesign, from scratch, by committee, of  
squeak.org is a different beast - a lot of work, and utterly useless if  
the community does not decide to adopt it.

Therefore I advocate an incremental solution. Continuous Improvement.

> You talk about a "project of respectable size". So what do you plan or  
> envision for squeak.org? You haven't said anything about that. And it  
> shouldn't be hard to write this down if the current squeak.org is that  
> bad.
>
First off, squeak.org is always "bad". By definition. It will never be  
finished, and will need continuous improvement. Short term improvements:
- Maybe an updated look, although that's not very important;
- A more concise and complete tour of the premises for newbies, references  
to information that's normally hard-to-find, etcetera;
- (via a proxy) inclusion of the minnow wiki.
But that's just *a* list I'm making up as I type this mail, not *the*  
list. The idea is that we decide, as a community, what small bit needs to  
be tackled next. And that will be a continuous process.

> "Community-controlled server" sounds pretty neat. But what does that  
> mean? Would it be controlled by you and some people of your choosing? Or  
> would anyone from this list have direct access to the server? Or based  
> on the static social ranking on squeakpeople? Or..?

That server is there. There is a number of sysadmins (Goran, Ken, me),  
which in some sense "control" the server, but we don't solely decide  
what's going to run there and what not. The suggestion that a community  
server needs to be accessible by everybody is, of course, absurd - the  
idea is that we can host services important to the Squeak community here,  
in a way that is largely independent of any single person of institution.  
And that the consensus of the community decides what's worthwhile to be  
hosted there or not.

> So if "it's not ok" my work won't be included? So I can't be "absolutely  
> sure that the results of my efforts are used"? Who is gonna decide "if  
> it's ok" or not?
>
The usual approach is that stuff is discussed here on the list, people get  
a sense for consensus and act based on that. Seems to work fine so far.



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