Re (tilly) 1: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List

My understanding is that vroom is busy. He is maintaining the site and adding various things behind the scenes to smooth things out overall (for instance he has made it possible to address various things with editors, he has done some things about bots, etc). However I don't think he has time for massive development. And donations are not coming in fast enough to pay for him to be a full time employee.

Given that I think it is more than slightly unfair for people to sit around tapping their toes asking when everything is going to be done already. Nor do I want to see features added which encourage this attitude. Are you paying the bills? No? Then you are a guest, please act that way. Even though I have donated some, I am likewise a guest. Unlike with open source software, the cost of running this site is centralized, not distributed.

So what can we do to improve that?

The obvious answer is that everyone can donate money so vroom can work full-time on the site. The offering plate is ready. Go to it! Hasn't really worked yet, but if you ask early and often...

Another idea is to distribute development. I don't know how other people feel, but I am strongly against having a large group of people added with any sort of administrative privileges. Or even local logins. OTOH I think it would be useful if, like happened with Slashdot and slashcode, it was easy to set up your own PerlMonks-like site. To some extent this is possible, the Everything code-base is available. But PerlMonks has diverged from that base. How much? I don't know. I am a user here, not a developer. Nor have I had time to study E2. But I know it diverged a while ago.

However were I to ask for any significant development, the development that I would like to see is this. I would like to see PerlMonks resynchronized as much as is feasible with E2, and then see a release of enough of the PerlMonks base and whatever else may be required so that anyone who wants to can download it, set up a working private version of PerlMonks, add a useful feature, export that feature, and others can copy it. I don't know how hard it is. I would guess not easy because much of the site is stored as data in a database...

I would be willing to pledge some money for that...though not much time. In fact when I see vroom tonight I will ask how doable that is...

Comment on Re (tilly) 1: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(tye)Re: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List by tye (Sage) on Aug 17, 2001 at 04:03 UTC
It seems clear to me that at least some distribution of development is required. But I think you've got the cart before the horse. Even if resynchronizing with E2 is practical, I would imagine that it would require enough work that I'd be quite surprised if vroom alone could manage to finish such a task even in the next couple of years (since he is busy and can't do this type of work full time). We need distribution of development effort long before we'll get synchronization between E2 and PM. I'd much rather go forward with the original plan for several people to be added to the developers group such that they have read-only access to the full, live source code of PM so that they can help vroom develop. This was even requested by an E2 developer who wanted to do some merging. So I think it is the clear first step towards being able to take more steps as directed by vroom. - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
(agent00013) Re: Re (tilly) 1: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List by agent00013 (Pilgrim) on Aug 17, 2001 at 02:59 UTC
Distributed development is doable. Yes, having a large development team can be a problem. Keep it simple. Only have a few. One primary (vroom, obviously), and a few others that know Everything well enough to help out with the site without destroying it or causing unecessary down time. Resynchronizing with Everything would probably be impossible with the ammount of changes it took to develop the current PerlMonks environment. I recall hearing that vroom hacked it quite a bit. The nodelets and such things all depend on various parsers and functions, and each section and individual node has moderation and voting glued to it. I'm sure there are many other pieces behind the scenes in Everything I haven't even glimpsed yet. The offering plate is not a solution. It would be wonderful to hire vroom full time to run the site, but unless a better payment system is put in place, he will never be afforded. Perhaps if users are able to put themselves down for a monthly credit-card contribution (or however-long) they would be more "generous" with their money. Something like this would enable a monk to give the gift that keeps on giving, without having to remember to keep giving. However, even this is likely not to work. Many people, however sad this may be, feel that just being in a community is enough of a contribution. Giving money would be "excessive." If there's another solution around, I'd sure love to hear it. I'm sure vroom would, also. Love is random; fear is inevitable. -- Orson Scott Card PerlMonks is good for Perl, but JavaJunkies is good for Java	[reply]
tip tip by da (Friar) on Aug 18, 2001 at 02:54 UTC
Maybe we should have a semi-mandatory 'tip tip'. I mean, what's a tip jar for, but people who have tips? Such as great suggestions for Our Fearless Leader and other developers? I suggest a $5 donation per idea (adjusted for personal circumstance).. And if you've voted a ++ and you think an idea is worth implementing, drop a fiver into the offering plate. That is sufficient for a few beers while those in charge mull things over. This would be a purely symbolic gesture of respect, being aware of the fact that we appreciate the work, and are willing to help out in any way possible. Update:I realize that many of us are in school or otherwise poor; the idea is a symbolic gesture, not the money involved. I just took a look at perlmonk's paypal stats; in the last 6 months, there have only been contributions by 50 or so monks. How about if we get that number closer to the number of active community members? Update2:Since I've been asked- you can find out from payPal what a payee's 'community rating' is; that corresponds to the number of people who have given money to the payee. `___ -DA > perl -MPOSIX -e'$ENV{TZ}="US/Eastern";print ctime(1000000000)' Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: (thabenksta) Re (tilly) 1: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List by thabenksta (Pilgrim) on Aug 16, 2001 at 23:51 UTC
While I understand that vroom is busy, I don't think that anyone is "tapping their toes". I just want to know what's happening. It doesn't matter if takes awhile, just as long as I know it's going to happen sooner or later. Another idea is to distribute development. This has been mentioned in Discussions before, and it's exactly the kind of thing that would be nice to know if it's going to happen. I think it's a great idea and I would love to help out with the site. -thabenksta `my $name = 'Ben Kittrell'; $name=~s/^(.+)\s(.).+$/\L$1$2/g; my $nick = 'tha' . $name . 'sta';` [download] Give Me a Dollar!	[reply] [d/l]


Perl-Sensitive Sunglasses
	PerlMonks