[DG: Euro Sakai] Resource bottlenecks and the need to look for dedicated effort.

[Berg, Alan]

Hi all,

At the Paris Conference Jean-Francois and myself were tasked with supporting the review of i18n  Jira patches that were long standing and did not appear to be moving forward. Neal Caidin followed through with looking at a number of example patches.  The conclusion was that the patches were bottlenecked due to the lack of a dedicated and trusted committer(s). Other slow moving patches include feature requests that have the same cause.

Murcia University have reviewed their local improvements. When they migrate to the our best Sakai version ever (2.9.1) they will follow community best practice and try to return the improvements all 22 patches back to trunk. I expect that a similar bottleneck condition will ensue under the present conditions.

For the efficiency of the Internationalization effort, adding of feature requests and pushing local changes back into trunk, it is worth a debate about sharing and channelling developer effort into elevating this bottleneck.  Is there enough common ground to provide a shared resource such as 2 developers working 1 day a week. This will help move along priority Jira's. The developers could then be mentored  gaining  the trust of the small core of hard working developers who work on Sakai centrally.

What do you think? Please discuss this on list. If you have developer time to donate please contact Neal Caidin and myself.


Regards,
           Alan


Alan Berg

Innovation working group
On the use of ICT in Education & Research
University of Amsterdam