[josm-dev] Please invest some time into documentation - especially confilict resolution

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sun, 4 Oct 2009, Karl Guggisberg wrote:

>> No. All my experience shows that this is untrue. People either help or 
>> they don't help.
>
> This goes along with my experience but the interesting point is how to find
> those who want to help. What do you have to do to attract people who would
> like to improve JOSMs documentation? I think today they don't even know that
> JOSM is looking for help. If we want documentation work to be done we should
> promote it. We can mention it on the JOSM home page as sub project, we can
> structure the work to be done, we can describe what we need, we can provide
> one or two good examples and tell people that we need more of the same. We
> can announce that we are looking for help on OSM dev, or on the german list
> for translation, for instance to achieve some small goal until end of
> october (i.e. complete documentation of the conflict resolution dialogs).

When we last had that discussion we improved the JOSM webpage and the 
start page of JOSM to show most of the tasks to be done (the "How to help" 
section). The notes to help translating using launchpad did have some 
effect I think, but not very much at all.

Lots of mails in the mailinglists never had an effect until now.

Maybe something like a Google's "summer of code" would help, but I fear 
this is only for coding and not for all the other stuff. But that goes 
down to "pay for it", which I always say works for unwanted tasks. I also 
would do JOSM documentation when I'm payed for it (but I'm not really 
cheap :-)

As maintainer I also do some of the stuff you mention above which you 
don't see, but the results are usually very little. As this has been equal 
for all projects I participated (which are really a lot) I decided for 
myself that I wont spent a lot time for recruiting. When someone shows up 
(like you or Jiri) I try a lot to encourage these people to stay, but I 
don't actively search (which e.g. means I accept also patches which do not 
follow my quality requirements or fight for the developers in discussions 
even if I think myself they have been wrong :-).

We develop free open source software. Development in this area has its own 
rules and we can only live with them. I work in commerical as well as in 
open source area (and also do strategic decisions in both areas) and after 
longer experience you learn to respect the implicit rules. If you can show 
me that my view is wrong I would be happy, but I fear most of the efforts 
in recruiting help are better spent in UI improvements. The most important 
factor of open source is the available time of its participants (which 
BTW is not so different from commercial work).

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)