Call For *Your* Opinion

On 20.04.2010, at 14:56, Ian Trudel wrote:
>
> Bert, Hannes,
>
> I'd be please to read your answers on the survey that I have posted.

To be honest I didn't think the survey was aimed at me ;)

I personally don't see a "low level of contributions" and there are also no "hurdles" preventing me personally from contributing.

I read a report a while ago (my google-fu is not strong enough to find it though) that it is quite normal in open-source projects to have very few very active contributors and many more less active contributors. That's the Pareto principle at work. So I'm not desperate at all :)

I am, however, interested in what others perceive to be obstacles to contributing, so thank you very much for starting this survey!

- Bert -

2010/4/20 Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]>:
> On 20.04.2010, at 14:56, Ian Trudel wrote:
>>
>> Bert, Hannes,
>>
>> I'd be please to read your answers on the survey that I have posted.
>
> To be honest I didn't think the survey was aimed at me ;)

It is aimed for the community. I was not sure whether the board
members should or should not take part of the survey because it is
important to listen to what the community has to say. However, it's
equally important to know how board members see the world. Provided
that the two views are not the same, it proves that there are
something to talk about. Doesn't it?

Andreas lead the way and answered the survey, nobody got hurt. Perhaps
it's all right for the other board members to take the survey too. :)


> I am, however, interested in what others perceive to be obstacles to contributing, so thank you very much for starting this survey!

You're welcome. I am absolutely delighted by the participation so far.
There is a tremendous amount of information to learn from what the
participants wrote. Now, the only question is how do we get all the
people on the list to fill this survey. ;)

> - Bert -


Ian.
--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/

On Monday 19 April 2010 04:19:32 pm Ian Trudel wrote:

> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to
> Squeak?
Information about Squeak is spread all over the Web. It took me a lot of time
to collect them (text, video, active essays) and sift the current ones from
the obsolete ones. I wish squeak.org were a one-stop reference for the latest
info.

Dis-orientation. I got drawn to Squeak because of my interest in helping young
learners (the spirit behind ST-80 and Etoys). I guess I walked willy nilly
into the Squeak forks and splits. Too many mails in squeak-dev :-(. I took
quite some time to sort it all out.

Lack of Modularity. Squeak is no longer a small image and it is hard to
isolate code into packages and work on them separately. There was too much
volatility in the basic VM, plugins and image.

Lack of Plugin Dev kit. I started off on a small plugin and got sucked into VM
and plugin build related issues. This was very discouraging in the beginning.
Plugins development shouldn't be this hard.

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

Consolidate and edit documents - text, audio, video - into wiki. Weed out
obsolete references (or atleast mark them as obsolete).

The new trunk system is good and makes it easy to converge code between
different images.

Separate plugin development from the rest of the VM and plugin builds. If I
have to create a plugin for TeX, then I should not have to setup build
environment for, say, font libraries. What seems obvious to the experts is not
at all so for beginners.

SFC membership is a milestone. Helps us integrate into the FOSS eco-system.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

Discuss non-trivial code in mailing list or chat before putting them into
trunk/inbox. This gives others a chance to study the impact (say on
multilingual support or handheld form factors) and pitch in their
contributions.

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

Mailing list is not a good medium for resolving social conflicts. That requires
a chat line. I believe, if the postings to this mailing list tilts more
towards code than it is now, contributions will automatically increase.

If Squeakers are used to using MLs for resolutions, should there be a squeak-
conflicts mailing list ;-)?

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

Reach out to the young - schools and colleges. Create a separate mailing list
(squeak-edu) for discussions about squeak in curriculum, term projects,
research topics etc.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)
8.

> 7. What is your rating based on?
Squeakers are one of the smartest bunch of developers I have met so far.
Responses are quick and to the point. I do feel put off when the conflicts break
out and skip over the postings for a few days.

> 8. Anything else?
Thank you for reaching out to the community. We need to take the same open
approach to the larger non-dev community too.

Is it possible to put a RSS feed to squeak.org home page so that non-
developers can sign up for major News and Announcements?

Subbu

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, Ian Trudel wrote:

> Dear Squeakizen,
>
> I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
> am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
> sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.
>
> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
>
> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

These two are related. I've been toying with Squeak since some time around
2000, and used it commercially since 2003/4. I'm using Seaside to build
web stuff, so from that point of view, Squeak has been "feature complete"
(it can read files, send bytes over sockets etc) for me for years already.
The only significant improvement would be a faster VM, but that's outside
of my competence.

I know people have all kinds of visions for doing things in Squeak and
work towards that, but I don't. So what would make me contribute would be
having some sort of project/problem I'm interested in, from which I could
take potential contributions. When I started doing web stuff, I needed
Glorp to interface with my databases, so got involved with porting it to
Squeak and mantained the port for few years.

Technically I don't see hurdles to contributing. The trunk process is easy
enough.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

That they don't mess up my workflow. That's what I'm mostly doing these
days - reporting bugs and screaming when people alter some long standing
behaviors (e.g. reusing browser windows instead of opening new ones).

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

lack of time

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

some kind of sponsorship, the same way large companies employ people to
work on open sores projects full time (linux, postgres etc)

also, I think a big problem with communication on squeak-dev is that
people just WON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE EMAIL SUBJECT to what they are
talking about, so you see long threads discussing 3-4-5 completely
different topics during their lifetimes. So you either have to read
everything (which is tiresome/costs time) or simply miss stuff that you
might care about.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

4

> 7. What is your rating based on?

I like powers of 2, but 8 seemed too high

> 8. Anything else?

maybe some people are uncomfortable speaking up so you should say it's ok
to respond to you privately too

rado

Ok, I'll give it a go.

> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

Other priorities.

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

Money.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

I expect folks to take responsibility for their contributions.  If I
break something, then I have affected the lives of my friends on this
list, so it is imperative that I step up, take responsibility, and
address the situation ASAP.  Late in the 4.1 process, the Lexicon
(Protocol) browser got badly broken; and I didn't feel the party whose
change caused the breakage (which, I don't even know who it was and I
don't care at this point) was the same party who stepped up and
covered for them.

Other than the above point, I would say, no expectations can be made
of volunteers.  Equally important, *volunteers* cannot expect that
their work will be automatically accepted by the community and
integrated into Squeak.

>From this aspect, the only way to guarantee Squeak moving forward is
to adopt a policy of distributed harvestation that does not depend on
these expectations.  A system of contribution where Squeak (and
contributors) can selectively-harvest, back-and-forth, where each
party (contributor and Squeak) can adopt a policy of "mutual
selfishness" and still progress forward.

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

I wouldn't know to characterize it as "low".  However, if the question
is, "what are the reasons the level of contributions from other
community members isn't higher, according to you?" then I would say,
first, "I don't know", second, "it depends on each individuals
situation" and, third, "because a system of mutually-selfish
contribution and harvestation isn't perfected yet."

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

Make Squeak more useful, interesting, and graphically stimulating.  I
think (too) many folks are motivated by simple cosmetics.  But hey, if
it works...

I don't mean to be too philosophical, but for someone to "decide" to
make a contribution, it means, by defiinition, that Squeak was useful
and *interesting* enough for them to attempt to harvest from it what
they needed for their own selfish purposes.  If a process is in place
which allows (the general parts of) their work to be back-harvested
into Squeak, then voila, you have a "contributor".

The *number* of contributions is not really a concern to me as much as
*which* and the *quality* of contributions made.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

7.

> 7. What is your rating based on?

My familiarity with the individuals and personalities on the various
mailing lists.

> 8. Anything else?

 - Chris

Ian Trudel wrote on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:49:32 -0400
> Dear Squeakizen,
>
> I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
> am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
> sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.
>
> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

My current focus in on where Squeak will be in the next few years, which
makes it hard to keep up with what is happening now (much less actually
help with that).

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

I think what I am doing now is the best use of my time. If someone
proves me wrong, I would change my priorities.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

I suppose some people will like them, other will be against. Since I
will use them in any, either we will have a fork or Squeak as a whole
will go my way. I prefer the second result, but don't consider the
alternative a disaster.

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

In the past it was partly my fault. My impression was that the
relicensing effort would be nearly impossible with a moving target and
told the community we should hold off further development until that was
solved. As I worked on the problem I realised that I was wrong - a
previously "clean" method couldn't become a problem by having someone
who had already agreed to the MIT license mess around with it.

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

The Trunk model seems to have produced interesting results. But I think
better integration with other communities, such as Etoys and Croquet,
will bring more contributors.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

8

> 7. What is your rating based on?

I was around since the begining, while other people have gone away and
others are just arriving. So there is a bit of a lack of sense of
history, with repeated projects and repeated mistakes.

I don't agree at all that the board should be doing this, and find it
great that you have taken the initiative. As I have said before, the
board's powers are all related to the "Squeak" brand. So it would be bad
if you did this and somehow pretended to officially represent Squeak,
but that wasn't at all the case here. Things should be community driven
as much as possible and not have the board as a bottleneck.

-- Jecel

Ian Trudel ian.trudel at gmail.com
Mon Apr 19 10:49:32 UTC 2010 wrote:



Dear Squeakizen,

I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.

#1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

a) Feedback on previous contributions.

I do bug tracking by first observing them then writing up the complaints on a mantis report. Finding one other person interested in fixing the bug is usually the start of an effort on it. The interaction fuels the interest of the two or more parties.

I have also worked on bugs singly, adding more data and analysis to the report until I am either satisfied or bored. The contributions from that will wait for a gatekeeper to become interested. While this sometimes works, usually it runs into problems. The gatekeepers are interested in dismissing the idea and closing the report. They have their own focus and priorities and do not share mine. So after learning this efforts on contributing to a bug fix tends to get suspended or its priority lowered if I am the only one persuing it.

This is the lesson agile programming teaches about pair programming.

#2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

a) Pair programming.

b) Authoritative and definitive sources of useful information about how to program. I don't expect someone to go back and document ancient stuff. However when a new tool is introduced, good, clear, parctical advice and examples are needed to increase the number of people skilled in using it.

#3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

You never know whats going to happen until you give others a chance to reply. The internet is the home of the long tail. Any question will have somebody out there who can help with the answer. The question is whether they are monitoring the question.

Squeaks community is rather small. Good feedback is hard to come by here.

#4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?

???? Can only speak for myself.

However I imagine what I said above applies to others. Gentle interaction with good people certainly helps. The creation of 4.0 and 4.1 took off IMO because Andreas provided leadership and good feedback to peoples requests and comments. He also got good people involved. KUDOs

#5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?

a) The communication of a clear sense of purpose. What and who are the version of squeak we produce here uniquely designed for. Here unique means in contrast to the purposes of Pharo, Etoys, Newspeak, and Dan's lively kernel. Up to now the supposed purpose of squeak has been unsettled because the leadership has been unsettled and constantly changing. Squeaks most salient product to date has been forks.

b) New and better means for the community to interact with each other.
The current swiki, mantis, the mailinglist and the irc channels do not seem sufficient. From my experience I think the community could greatly benefit from the addition of a wiki or a wiki farm based on mediawiki. That's an important enough idea it will be worth writing about in its own post. Think "Squeakapedia".

#6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
highest)

It varies with time. Both the community and the rating. Currently the piece of squeak that drew me here, the child component, is being pursued elsewhere. In that fork my best contributions are languishing for lack of others interest.

So I rank myself greater than 4 and less than 10.

#7. What is your rating based on?

See above. The residual interest is based on a love for Alan Kay's vision, and what I perceive as the spirit of the squeak language. I.E. what it wants to become.

#8. Anything else?

Yes, It would be unrealistic to expect the board to initiate these surveys. There are only seven people on the board and the board is international rather than co-located. Which means a good deal of energy gets put into just meeting and communicating.

Initiative for this kind of thing deserves to come from someone with love for the language and the community who is willing to provide the "this-shall-be-done" bit. That's the bit that sees a project through to its useful conclusion.

I can see that even just the attention of this survey project and everyone's ability to read everyone else's responses has sparked peoples hope and willingness to initiate projects of their own.

Good work, Ian.

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace




     

(Repost of the survey is available below this message)

This is a courteous reminder for those who haven't yet participated to
the survey. You may be hesitant to answer for a reason or another.
Your contribution is important to us as you can see in this thread.
Beginners to expert are all invited to participate. Don't assume what
you think has already been written, it sure hasn't been written by
*you*.

Time and money are amongst the most influencing factors nowadays. You
should tell us about it. You could perhaps also tell us more about
secondary issues that prevents you from contributing. Squeak community
may not be able to give away more time and money but we certainly can
address secondary issues.

The community has positively reacted to the answers from members who
have participated so far. Some of you may not be in position to answer
publicly and I will honour answers sent privately to me in all due
confidentiality.

Remember: the more answers we get, the better! Whether there is 20 or
200 replies, I will go through all of them. The answers will be
compiled after a week or two without any new replies.

Ian.
--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/


= Survey ======

1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?

5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?

6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
highest)

7. What is your rating based on?

8. Anything else?

see below

--
Enrico Spinielli
"Do Androids dream of electric sheep?"— Philip K. Dick
"Hear and forget; see and remember;do and understand."—Mitchel Resnick

Am 19.04.2010 um 12:49 schrieb Ian Trudel:
> Dear Squeakizen,
>
> I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
> am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
> sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.
>
> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
1. Lack of a real use case or killer application: I don't use Squeak myself for anything, other than playing with it. I stick around because I love Smalltalk's elegance and the richness of ideas of Squeak's community.
2. Doubts about the viability of the idea of platform independent rich client development only: I can't use it to write Mac OS X applications with a native UI using all the cool Apple graphics frameworks.
3. Fragmentation of the community, too many forks, too many mailing lists, too many parallel developments
4. Personal fights on the mailing list
5. Lack of free time.

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?
1. Finding an application I can use Squeak for.
2. Being able to access every feature of the underlying platforms

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
Contributions should not break other contributions because that leads to a vicious circle even if that means slower progress.

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?
I can only guess. But is it really low? Maybe being even friendlier to each other would help.

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?
1. Improve code quality
2. Make the community bigger by remerging with the Etoys and Croquet communities
3. More frequent releases, at least 4 per year.
4. Clarify Squeak's positioning, e.g. in relation to Pharo

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)
7

> 7. What is your rating based on?
Identification with the ideal, i.e. the Dynabook vision, focus on simplicity, elegance, readability, new ideas, pink and blue plane development at the same time.

> 8. Anything else?
With the new trunk process I can contribute even if I have only 15 minutes. That's GREAT. Thanks!!!

= Survey ======

1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

I am working on some open source projects which are not ready for release.
When they are ready I will release them.
The only thing I released so far was my  FasterSets package.  It was pretty
much ignored until  Levente Uzonyi decided to rewrite it from scratch and had
his version contributed to trunk.
As a result my contribution to Squeak is still 0.

2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

>From my point of view I am contributing.  I am just not able to release
what I have done yet.  Given that my opinions on matters I have posted
on have generally differed from just about everybody else  it will be
interesting to see how my contributions are received once they are
released.

3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
I hope (not necessarily expect) that some subset of the community will
take sufficient interest in the contribution to provide valuable feedback
and perhaps even get involved in improving the contribution.
For the latter I guess Levente Uzonyi did this in the extreme with my
FasterSets package.  Beware of what you wish for, your wish may be
granted.

4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?
I really don't know.  I know some people are contributing a lot.
I assume part of the issue is that there just aren't a lot of others.
I know Keith Hodges used to contribute a lot to Squeak but has
become alienated from this community and so releases little
now.  I consider this a serious loss for Squeak.

5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?
I don't really know.   Given the small size of the Smalltalk/Squeak
communities though I view all the forks with some level of regret.
More forks means more innovation I know but my main thought
is that I am going to have to port my contributions to each of the
forks and that is a pain.  Anything that can be done to reduce this
pain will help.

6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
highest)

Around  4.  My biggest frustration is making a posting requesting
feedback and getting no feedback at all.
There is a tendency of readers of my posts to jump on some point
in a posting and then ignore the rest of the posting.
This can be frustrating at times.
I experience these problems with other communities as well.


Regards,

Ralph Boland



--
Volume * Density = Mass.
Volume / Density = Intelligence.
The latter equation explains the equal intelligence
of men and women and the capabilities of some
well known operating systems.

(Repost of the survey is available below this message)

This is most likely the last call for this survey as the number of
contributions to it have drastically decreased. I have seen many on
the list who haven't participated yet and I'd be glad to hear from
you. Or do I have to email everyone personally? ;)))

I will compile data around May, 10th and a report will be eventually written.

Ian.
--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/

= Survey ======

1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?

2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
other community members, according to you?

5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
contributions and the number of contributors?

6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
highest)

7. What is your rating based on?

8. Anything else?

On 5/1/10, Ian Trudel <[hidden email]> wrote:
Actually with the new trunk system with several commiters are at work
it is possible to get something into the image in a much shorter time.
Putting things into the inbox is easy.
I'm interested in documentation and that has now become a priority. So
actually no hurdles anymore.

> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

The system as such is complex and there are many spots where one could
contribute.
Maybe a working group having a certain focus for a certain time.
XP style working groups. Or "sprints". Or putting something like
'Scrum' in place.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?
To be of high quality. That does not mean that everybody's
contribution have to be perfect before they get submitted. But other
people should check it and give feedback quickly. A group of
moderately talented people can accomplish a lot in case they
cooperate, i.e. communicate. (In addition to the highly productive
exceptional coders :-)

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

I think it needs some time (1..2 years) for people to realize that now
with the trunk system things are moving faster.

The other thing is that it is not easy because often you have to do
'design recovery'. There are many unwritten assumptions of concepts
which are not spelled out. And some of them are competing.

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

Stable interfaces. In Java you have interfaces which gives you a lot
of work to do but libraries load fine.
The borders between interface and implementation in Squeak are blurred.
Method categories are their for informational purposes only.
If I want a mineral from a soda-vending machine I want to know which
buttons to press and I do not want to learn how to make a copy of the
soda-vending machine. Of course it is nice if I can do that if I want
so, but I should not be forced to go to quickly into details.

An example: Today I wanted to load the HTML parser of Todd Blanchard
http://www.squeaksource.com/htmlcssparser. It did not load though it
was last updated on 23 January 2009 and has 2768 downloads. So in the
past it was useful but now no longer works. An HTML parser is
something crucial these days.

Quality: It is not clear what Squeak delivers and what not. For a
small group of developers it is difficult to maintain a whole software
stack. Code breaks too often all the time.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

4...10 (varies over time, depends on the things I'm working on. If I
have a project where I can use Squeak the identification is high, if I
do not use it the interest is low). It takes a considerable effort to
mentally shift gears between Java and Smalltalk. However it is
refreshing to do so from time to time.

> 7. What is your rating based on?

just an estimate

> 8. Anything else?

a)I think the version 4.1 is a very nice new base to build upon. For
prototypes, data conversion and integrity checks exercises, Morphic
experiments, presentations, Seaside programming.

b) A downside is that contrariwise to Java a lot of the libraries are
weak and not well supported (often the work of a single person without
the cooperation of somebody doing test and documentation). This might
easily eat up the time gained because of the more productive
environment. The Java IDEs are good. You write a lot more
(configuration files etc), but there are lots of examples. Learning is
not easy either though. But there are many libraries to choose from.
When starting to work with Squeak you may easily get side-tracked to
start working on the IDE rather than your app.

c) I think we should get the Pharo tests (around 9000) into Squeak.

d) Make use of the synergy with Pharo. It is good to have this fork
with a focus on SWEngineering and Web development. Focus on apps which
run on both while maintaining the specific focus.

e) Squeak is more general purpose and multimedia oriented. In this
area it is outstanding. It is a huge success that etoys runs on 1 mio
machines. And that there are 1 mio Scratch projects. I value the goal
of bringing Etoys (currently based on 3.8) and Scratch together.

f) Somebody has written that Squeak has only produced 'forks' so far.
I think this is actually good. It should be encouraged to create
derivative work based on Squeak. This makes it possible that different
groups can work independently which enhances productivity. If
something worthwhile comes out of a derivative work it may be folded
back into the main stream if it is not used commercially. I see the
fact the MIT license permits commercial use as useful. The advantage
of having derivative work is that they can have a clear focus. This
has happened in the past.

g) So the focus should be - and I assume it is - to come up with a
rather minimal base image (around 1500 classes, well documented with a
lots of tests - 12000), a set of well supported packages (another 2000
classes) on which people can build their own things.

h) I like the RCP GUI look of Squeak 4.1. The Pharo look is more
makeshift. I don't have a workspace anymore from which I can save a
text file. Too many things are cut off. This is fine for web
development and SW engineering analysis tasks. But for a general
purpose IDE it is too narrow. But it's good to have this fork. A kind
of second source.

j) I would see getting a menu system where small apps may be
registered (e.g. calculator, notepad, small text processor, scrapbook,
graphical import viewer, games, learning software, simulations).
The same thing applies to a good Preferences system. Going for <method
tags> seems to be straightforward to get it quickly done.

k) Updated and well tested XML and HTML parsers are a real need for
me. Something like JDOM is there but a bit shaky. Not enough tests.

i) As a whole it is a worthwhile endeavor. Thanks to everybody who has
made 4.1 possible. This is a big step forward.

On May 1, 2010, at 3:39 AM, Ian Trudel wrote:

Free time, and more interest in building things on top of Squeak than going through Mantis and clearing out existing bugs.


> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

The current process is fine for me.


> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

Compared to other open-source projects, I think that Squeak contributions should have more of a focus on simplicity (vs. fancy code), and on documentation.  This is because of the broad scope of Squeak.  People who aren't experts in a particular domain or Squeak subsystem may wander into unfamiliar code.  In a typical C-based open-source project, people don't just accidentally find themselves hacking the source-code of a new project.  Also, once they commit to contributing to a particular project, the narrower scope of most projects mean that there is less to become familiar with.  

In other words, one of Squeak's greatest strengths is easy access to the code of the entire system, and the advantage we derive from this depends on how easy the code is to understand and modify; we can make things easier by emphasizing simplicity and documentation.


> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

I haven't seen any evidence that our contribution level is low compared to other open-source projects, relative to our community size.  


> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

Improve documentation so that more people who glance at Squeak decide to stick around.


> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

9


> 7. What is your rating based on?
>

On my feeling of social identification with the Squeak community :-)

Not sure what else to say...


> 8. Anything else?

Nope.

Cheers,
Josh

Hi all,

I will compile data collected from this survey and make an
announcement whenever the report is available. Thank you to every
participant. It was fantastic to get your opinion and an enriching
experience!

Ian.
--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/