On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted Apr 21, 2010 21:09 UTC (Wed) by joey (guest, #328)
Parent article: On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Suprised that setting up a mailing list is any kind of hurdle.
But maybe the people I know are skewed toward those who run their own servers.

One way to get a mailing list is to use any of the forges (sourceforce.net, alioth.debian.org, savannah.nongnu.org). Just create a project for your event, put any custom code you develop in it. I doubt any of the forges would be against being used this way. Oh, and this also gives you a bug tracker.

On wikis, there are some that can use real html. Mediawiki might not be your best choice. I might be biased. :)

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On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted Apr 21, 2010 22:13 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (2 responses)

Again, it's not that a mailing list is hard in and of itself, it's that the closed source service offered by Google is orders of magnitude simpler. Point, click, done. When you don't know which direction a concept is going to take, the overhead of all of the other software-project-management setup processes (TOS, project approval policy, enabling features that you neither need nor want) put the code-centric services further behind the list-only offerings.

As for the forges you mention, Alioth and Savannah both have very strict pre-approval processes: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/03/msg00024.html and http://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php. SourceForge doesn't use a pre-emptive block on new projects, but it still requires that you produce code: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/What%20projects%20qualify%20for%20hosting%20at%20SourceForge.net? ... and in any case, you end up with a code project built around tools you do not need. Bugzilla is not capable of tracking event-planning tasks; the only relevant fields are Modified Date and Assigned To, which is essentially just as trackable as a wiki page or plain text document.

Nate

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted Jul 4, 2010 21:35 UTC (Sun) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

> Bugzilla is not capable of tracking event-planning tasks

There are extensions for things like that:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Addons#Project_manageme...

On bootstrapping a community-run FOSS event

Posted Oct 27, 2010 18:20 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

I just happened to revisit this article and notice the new comment. Of the Bugzilla plugins linked to, one appears to be abandonware (c.2007?) and the other three are all integration with a single, specific desktop application (TaskJuggler, Easy!Flow, and Microsoft Project).

The latter two are closed-source, which means they do not meet the criteria (and on top of that, Easy!Flow, while it may have "project management" capabilities, is still a software development app, not a general-purpose planning tool).

Nate