[Cosmo] Re: cosmo work

[Ted Leung]

On Jan 12, 2006, at 7:09 PM, Brian Moseley wrote:

> On 1/12/06, Ted Leung <twl at osafoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> If you don't tell anybody you are out there, how can they come help
>> you.  Hyping is one thing.   Quietly creating records in freshmeat
>> seems pretty safe.  The Serverside is a different story.
>
> i don't see how quietly creating records in freshmeat is going to be
> noticed by the people who might be most motivated to come help.
>
> i think that in order to attract the attention of people who will make
> impact, we will also have to attract the attention of people who will
> be impatient with early stage software and who will make false
> assumptions and spread fud.

I know that Freshmeat is read by a lot of people who actually do the  
work on open source projects.   These are the people that you want to  
reach, not the Slashdot/Serverside fanboys.   Perhaps we have  
different ideas about which audiences will actually show up and help.

>
> the story will be very different after 0.4, when all major
> infrastructure is in place, and maybe even after 0.3, when most of
> caldav is ready.

If you look at a lot of the Apache projects, people do show up even  
when the code is in a horrible state.

>
> if i have the minority opinion i'm happy to go do some PR, but i don't
> think i am.

There are other ways to get help besides doing a PR "blitz".   We  
wasted a good opportunity at ApacheCon because no one who actually  
knew anything about the Cosmo codebase was there.   Sometimes a  
little in person contact can go a long way.   We don't need to  
attract a lot of people to make a big impact on the project.

Ted