Community Awareness Suggestions
From FOSSWiki
Contents |
Introduction
This document aims to highlight the various aspects that can be worked on to create a community that will aid the development of Sahana. Apart from a core development team, I believe the OSS model relies heavily on secondary and tertiary developers, and indeed even user participation. This write up will aim to highlight some methods Sahana can use to cultivate a vibrant, loyal developer and user community. Many of these lessons have been learnt while working with the Wordpress documentation team.
Editing
Please feel free to edit this freely, as it is still a draft. Please use the talk page of this document for discussion.
IRC Channel or Forum
An IRC channel or forum should be setup so the core team can be in constant contact secondary / tertiary developers. Many of WordPress current features have stemmed from the community's Wednesday meetings on the #wordpress IRC channel.
Most importantly however, an medium like this is necessary so volunteers can provide support for Sahana. This support structure has been tried and tested on many OSS projects, and I doubt I need to go in to the benefits of a such a structure.
Plugin Architecture?
Although I'm not familiar with how the developers plan approach the creation of Sahana, I'm pretty sure that they will want to take a modular approach - keeping the core code lightweight and allowing expansion of it thereafter with the use of plugins and modules.
Having such an expandable architecture will enable secondary developers to write plugins / modules / language packs to customize their Sahan installations. These developers will continue to develop and update their modules as Sahana grows, creating a constant support community that Sahana users will be able to turn to.
