[Ekiga-devel-list] Reorganizing things

[Damien Sandras <dsandras seconix com>]

Dear all,

It appears clearly that since a few months I can dedicate less time than
before to Ekiga. During the first 5 to 6 years of the project, I was
dedicating all evenings to the project and nearly all week-ends, fully.

It is now impossible for me to continue developing at that pace. If we
organize things in a clever way, I think it will not be a problem. My
intensive work probably hide a few organization problems.

We now have a few very high quality contributors: they help the project
move forward will less "devotion" from myself.

The purpose of this e-mail is to identify the areas where people can
help and how we should work. But before identifying those areas, I would
stress on the fact that my wish is to release often, but with only a
limited set of new features, that are well-tested. We have seen in the
past that we had worked on many new features, half-finished, and that it
was hard to stabilize them before doing a release. I don't want this to
happen.

Here is the list of tasks I have identified.

a) Reorganization of the WEB service (ekiga.org + ekiga.net) : it is a
much required work to give the feeling of a united and well thought
service. We need designers for that task.

b) Reorganization of ekiga.net services : more stability, more features.
I can take care of that myself, but external help would be great.

c) Accounts support : we receive many e-mails of people wanting to
remove their account or wondering why it does not work. They are not
answered anymore. We need somebody to help with that.

d) Development : we need more developers. Eugen is handling bugzilla and
patches. Julien is coding a lot. Michael is working on the WIN32 version
which is nearly as good as the Linux version. More people like all of
them should join the Ekiga project and help improving it.

e) Documentation : Yannick has been managing this since a few years
nearly alone. Help is welcome.

f) User Support : We all do user support at some level. When we do user
support, it means we can not dedicate time to our other tasks to make
the software progress. More people working on user support should join.
Perhaps a forum instead of a mailing list would be more modern and ease
the task.

Did I forget something? 

Feel free to comment...
-- 
 _     Damien Sandras
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