I recently graffiti'd the Eclipse Planning Counncil Agenda with my $0.02 because I saw something I felt was incorrect. Not being one to posture and postulate wildly w/o facts to back myself up, I also created this supporting document: EMF 2.3 Plan History.
Why? Because on a recent blog entry, Bjorn brought up some excellent suggestions about having a good communication strategy so that your consuming teams (users, developers) can properly be made aware of lumps in the gravy.
At first I was annoyed, because I thought he was throwing rocks at EMF. But because I know we did damn near everything but sending up smoke signals to get the message out, I'd like to instead underscore all the places you can document and announce your plans to help grow your community:
- Architecture Council (meetings + minutes on website)
- Planning Council (meetings + minutes on website)
- Europa/Ganymede meetings (meetings + minutes on website)
- website (4 places: home, news, downloads, docs -- reuse information widgets or database content to be able to inform people in many ways)
- Eclipse wiki (project page, project category page)
- project newsgroups -- don't be afraid to cross-post to related newsgroups
- Cross Projects mailing list (cross-projects-issues-dev@)
- Planning Council mailing list (eclipse.org-planning-council@)
We have no favourite channel. We use them all. Sure, it's a lot of work and could be construed as overkill, but IMHO it's worth the cost because it shows project maturity and respect for the people who use your code. Need a more instant-gratification or cost-benefits-analysis rationalization than the warm-fuzzy-feelings one? How about free testing? Tell people about your planned changes and they can adapt faster -- and give you feedback sooner.
Oh, well, time to crank up some Billy Talent and let the weekend begin.
1 comments:
"Tell people about your planned changes and they can adapt faster and give you feedback sooner." -- Hear, hear!
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