[development] Wasting time and effort

[Greg Holsclaw]

In some good Web2.0 books like Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing
Without Organizations (by Clay Shirky, with some open source books also to
his name) and others, the concept of Publish then Filter is a main tenant of
Open Source and general Internet publishing in general. The old days of
print media where 'the professionals' had to filter because all the day's
info just couldn't fit into the printed pages of a newspaper are gone.

The whole idea of open source is someone started doing something and put it
out there for people to look at.

The main point now is the 'Filter' and publication. Discovering good modules
is hard, which is why findability is part of the Drupal.org redesign. I
think the effort should be there. Let download counts, peer review and
recommendation lists be the filter, not a review prior to publishing a new
project.

Publish then Filter, not the other way around.

-Greg

-----Original Message-----
From: development-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:development-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of andrew morton
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 6:30 PM
To: development at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [development] Wasting time and effort

Daniel's proposal to moderate the creation of project nodes is really
the only suggestion that I've found compelling in this thread. Having
a checkpoint that requires a maintainer to list other similar modules
and explain how their module is different from other existing ones
would be very helpful.

andrew

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Daniel F. Kudwien
<news at unleashedmind.com> wrote:
> One point of his proposal is valid though: We could do better in
preventing
> duplicated modules and efforts.
>
> We have
>
> - CVS sandboxes for experimental code. (I'd argue that almost no one knows
> about sandboxes and how to use them)
>
> - Official projects on drupal.org. (With complete release, issue, and
> versioning systems)
>
> - No "moderation" for new project nodes. (Anyone with a CVS account is
able
> to create anything)
>
>
> Question:
>
> Would it really hurt the process of evolution and innovation in Drupal
when
> a new project ("request") would go into a "new projects queue" first,
where
> all community members could do a quick review and optionally point to a
> possible existing project that could benefit from additional man-power,
> features, and stuff?
>
> Would such a process not even do the opposite - speeding up evolution (by
> not duplicating efforts)?
>
>
> I mean, as a developer, I can review a module's code to find out which
> module is sane to use.  Regular Drupal users cannot - they have to blindly
> choose one of the modules.  Whether developer or user, finding out which
> module to choose is a pain, a "waste of time and effort".
>
> Implementing that process would be fairly easy.  So I can only guess that
> the majority of developers a) either does not know about CVS sandboxes, or
> b) likes to have duplicate efforts, or that c) I'm on crack.
>
> sun
>
>