Peter,
I agree with most of what you have said below
On 27/10/2005, you wrote:
I agree it would be a shame to let this opportunity pass by. However, I have a hard time (like all of us it seems) determining how the students could contribute. During my last business trip I made an effort to determine why exactly I have problem doing so. I came up with the following obstacles: In General:
- This is a (huge) project, managed and run in spare time via the
internet. Consequences:
- No day-to-day management;
- Ad-hoc communication. You can't rely and shouldn't expect
anybody to be available just when you need'm
Project related:
- I only have outdated, and probably partial information on who's doing
what;
- I don't have 'easy' access to what has already been (partially)
completed; - I only have a high level idea of what still has to be done;
except the above, if people kept the project management site up-to-date (and it is mostly) then you should have an idea about where we are:
http://dev.amigaopenoffice.org
Student related:
- With the info provided so far, I really have no idea what can be
expected from them (this is related to me not being English (the courses they've done mean zilch to me) and me not being a C programmer. Somebody else here might actually have a clue).
Summary: We have a huge project, and insufficient means to manage it.
Proposal: Maybe the students could develop a generic (there may follow other projects of this nature, after all) toolset, that helps us manage the following aspects of the project:
- who's doing what;
- status info per project component (what's finished, what's in progress,
what needs to be done);
- We need to be able to easily address the following scenario: 'Hi, I'm a
C-programmer and I want to help. What can I do?'
If someone(s) were to fill in Olegil's dependancy database then we could add tasks to the PM site and have them ready to be assigned.
The first two issues can be handled by the project-management website IIRC. (No idea if we can put dependency data in there though, nor if that's easily done). I don't have the URL handy atm, sorry.
Yes dependancy data can go in there, in as much as tasks can be dependant on other tasks.
I mean, Rogue or Entilzha offered help a while back and nothing came of it because we didnt have a list of tasks to offer.
Mark