Hi Italo,
You call out the ESC here: Sorry, but I give up, so please allow me to react to that here.
Unfortunately I don’t think we have 150 developers who just wait for somebody to tell them what to do.
The ESC - provides a meeting point to resolve conflicts and to report on the current status of some efforts. Occasionally it gets involved in some technical conflict - it doesn’t strategically plan features, and has no way to tell others what to do. Even with action items, I always ask the person in question if they’re OK to do XY before giving them the matching action item when I lead the meeting.
I guess part of the trouble is that most users have good ideas on what to do, but compared to that, there is only a small amount of developers who have the time to implement some of them.
I believe that would require the ESC to do some kind of management of developers, while it’s a coordinating body in its current form.
We don’t tell people what to do because most developers are either volunteers or they work for some company. Volunteers usually contribute because they have some own need they want to fix. Developers working for a company typically have their customers, so they spend most of their time on their customer’s need. And the hope is that the result is generally useful for everyone.
Based on this, it sounds like a bad conclusion that the ESC would control anything – the idea is that we coordinate the already happening work, to have technical input from everyone involved. If somebody would question this, please join one of the ESC calls and you’ll see it yourself. Perhaps the ESC is a friendly place because whenever there is a task to be done, all we can do is asking nicely & hoping.
At least I personally would never try to get rid of you, and I assume that most developers would agree with that, so please try to avoid such general statements, it’s not motivating.
I guess one big difference compared to 2011 is that TDF now has people and money to have a real impact on how libreoffice is improving. TDF developers can add features, TDF has the money to run tenders – the board can vote on budget and decide what feature development to fund an so on. I would hope that in case you’re not happy where TDF is heading with libreoffice development, these tools could help to adjust that direction.
What do you think, what would be a way to get more, constructive feedback from non-developers to have an understanding what people want as next features? Perhaps some kind of brainstorming session?
Heiko already runs the design meetings and does a nice job of triaging those ideas: some can be just done, some need engineering input and he lists those bugzilla bugs on a weekly basis, takes it to the ESC. When somebody instantly has an idea, they can comment on that – otherwise it’s always possible to comment in bugzilla later. Perhaps the same could be done in other areas of the project.
To sum up, sounds like the problem is that you find the process of adding new features to libreoffice too closed – what do you think, how should we improve & open up this process more?
And then I guess the next step would be for TDF to invest more in actually implementing some of those good ideas.
Thanks,
Miklos