[Scooby] Re: [Cosmo] A couple big ideas: cosmo release and server project merge

[Brian Moseley]

On 2/3/06, Ted Leung <twl at osafoundation.org> wrote:

> A better/more efficient community -- the last few messages have been
> about why having two communities was wrong and how we should have one
> so that we can be more efficient, etc.   Today it's the case that
> people working on Cosmo care about Scooby and vice versa, but I don't
> think that will be true in the future.  What happens when there's
> enough traffic to have *-user lists?  You're probably going to have
> cosmo-user and scooby user.

fair enough.

i've exhausted my energy for caring about the issue of unifying the
two porojects, which means that it really must not be that important
to me :) it was just an off the cuff suggestion.

> A project is a community of people who are working on a code base
> together.    With snarf, I didn't feel that just the packaging code/
> build scripts was worth starting a whole separate community for.

i agree, and that was never my intention. maybe people assumed it was
when i made that wiki page. dunno.

> You didn't like the alternative that I proposed which was that you
> put the build scripts etc for snarf in a subdirectory of scooby, and
> make the snarf download available from the scooby downloads page.

right. so what about the folks who come to the cosmo community looking
for a turnkey calendar server. do we tell them they've come to the
wrong place and need to go to the fancy web calendar ui project to
find the calendar server download?

you say "ok, put it into the cosmo project instead". what about the
people who come to scooby looking for an integrated web calendar
bundle? do the scooby folks tell them to go to the server project to
find the download?

which option is better? is either any good at all?

at the end of the day i think we need to work the hardest to cater to
the people coming to look for the all in one thinger. they are the
ones who are going to be least excited about going from page to page
looking for the thing to download. they are the ones who should have a
very simple page with a big red arrow saying DOWNLOAD HERE, and that
page should be in the first, most obvious  place they might think to
look. i don't think that's going to turn out to be either the scooby
or cosmo projects.

i think there is tremendous value in a huge flashing neon sign saying
"OSAF SHARING SERVER! GET IT HERE! FREE 4 U!", putting the integrated
bundle there, and saying "interested in exploring the components of
this bundle? click here and here and here and here and here." maybe
this is just a new landing page and not a new project wiki or anything
of the sort, but then where does the documentation go? the cosmo and
scooby docs are on their project wikis.

i know i do a pretty poor job of articulating my thoughts most of the
time, but i really hope that you're getting my point that the
integrated bundle isn't just another download option but is most
likely going to be the thing that attracts the most users - not
developers, not project contributors, but actual users. i think it's
such an important thing that it should have its own identity. i'm not
sure if that has to mean it deserves project status, but it definitely
means that we need to give it *some* sort of special treatment.