Fund raiser for our projects

[Simone Mosciatti]

Hi everybody,

I get a little idea now that we are heading to Christmas.

Would be nice to organize a little fund raiser to support our projects.

We have a lot of great project, but first of all good documentation is not the norm.

Then there are a lot of spot where we can improve-- I am thinking about web authentication, friends is great but the same author suggest to add security and a bunch of other type of authentication, but obviously there is more.

I am making a personal project and I am find some sort of lack in any library I am using, however I don't have neither the time nor the knowledge to really improve the situation.

Maybe the author of the library would have at least the knowledge so if we can raise some money to buy his/her time would be really nice, wouldn't ?

Finally we should also involve the company that are using clojure ( http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Stories more http://www.quora.com/Whos-using-Clojure-in-production ) to raise bigger money.

I thought about and I have some idea how decide what project would get the -hypotetical- money.

Anyway before to even think about how organize everything I want to know what the community think about that.

It is possible ? It can be dangerous ? We shouldn't do that ? 

Thanks for the attention.

Greets

Simone Mosciatti

[Jim - FooBar();]

I'll be honest with you... I 'm not sure I understand at all what you
mean! raise money for people to document their open-source projects better?

forgive me but I missed your point... :-)

Jim

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[Simone Mosciatti]

I would say raise money to help people improve their project (documentation is a very important part that).

With a little of our effort and a big jump thank to some company we would improve a lot of projects.

It will help everybody...

The developers that finally get something from their open source project

The community and the company that can now use better library ...

I don't know, it is just an idea, if nobody see any point, too bad...

[Jim - FooBar();]

aaa ok that makes things clearer...thank you I get your point now! i can't say it doesn't make sense but i would say it's rather ambitious. :-)

Jim

[Paul deGrandis]

We keep bringing up the same social problem: We have brilliant people contributing quality code, with a lack of documentation, polish, and to some degree community management/engagement.

The solution is simple: help out by writing or improving documentation, building demo apps, writing tutorials, and sharing success stories.
All of the creators and maintainers of these projects LOVE being engaged by those interested in the project.  They will take the time to help you adopt their stuff and patch up libraries to solve your specific problems (time-allowing).

I think a general fund/fundraiser is a bad idea, but I'm all for a Clojure Ecosystem bounty page/site.  If companies or individuals want to put monetary support behind a feature/bug-fix/tutorial, I think we should let them.  This approach has worked well for Mozilla, Apache, and others.  We would just have to be mindful that the bounties are for the ecosystem and not for Clojure-proper development.

Don't be scared to reach out and approach the authors of the libraries you're using.  I've had much success directly contracting creators/maintainers of open source projects.

Regards,
Paul

[Jim - FooBar();]

On 05/09/12 19:35, Paul deGrandis wrote:
> Don't be scared to reach out and approach the authors of the libraries
> you're using. I've had much success directly contracting
> creators/maintainers of open source projects.

me too :-)

Jim

[Jim - FooBar();]

and by looking at the actual source rather than the docstring...

Jim

[Simone Mosciatti]

My point is that by the time that I am able to write a nice/useful article about any library a maintaners of the lib would be able to write 10 articles way better.

Then still there if I write one article, you write another and @whoever write the next we will have 3 different articles in 3 different blogs, honestly I am sure that 3 articles doesn't worth 3 page of real documentation (and because in your article you cannot assume that your readers know what you are talking about, but you can do so in the second page of a wiki, and because probably the maintaners of the lib would write it better)

Finally you cannot assume that the creators of a library will be always there to help us, they may change career, they may don't have time anymore for some stuff, they may move in Buthan, however you can be about sure that a wiki page will still.

And again, I am not talking only about add documentation but also improve what we have now, and why not?, start something new.

I don't know if there is anybody that think that it is a good idea...

[Phil Hagelberg]

Paul deGrandis <paul.de...@gmail.com> writes:

> We keep bringing up the same social problem: We have brilliant people
> contributing quality code, with a lack of documentation, polish, and
> to some degree community management/engagement.
>
> The solution is simple: help out by writing or improving
> documentation, building demo apps, writing tutorials, and sharing
> success stories.

Completely agree here; this would help a lot more than money.

One other thing to note is that sometimes even simply pointing out where
you ran into trouble trying to get started with a project can be helpful
as a usability bug report. Often library authors have a hard time with
documentation simply because it's difficult to put yourself in the shoes
of a new user when you know the software inside and out.

It can be helpful in some cases to blog about how you got something
working, but it's much more helpful to contribute to the official
documentation, even if it's more work. In many cases the project changes
in the future and third-party blog documentation ends up doing more harm
than good.

-Phil

[Brian Marick]

On Sep 5, 2012, at 12:15 PM, Simone Mosciatti wrote:

> I would say raise money to help people improve their project (documentation is a very important part that).

Many people who are good at writing code are not good at writing documentation. Writing good explanations is hard, even if you have a knack for it. It's not something J. Random Superprogrammer can just automatically do by virtue of his enormous brain.

If money is to be spent, it would be better spent on people other than the developers, people who *don't* know the project (because the troubles they have learning it will inform their documentation), are quick studies, and are skilled explainers.

-----
Brian Marick, Artisanal Labrador
Contract programming in Ruby and Clojure
Occasional consulting on Agile
Writing /Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer/: https://leanpub.com/fp-oo

[nchurch]

It's worth pointing out that the tools Clojure is built on (chiefly
Java) are themselves the products of companies. If Sun hadn't stayed
behind Java, we'd probably still be coding Java in a C ecosystem,
rather than Clojure in a Java ecosystem.

Sun of course was a huge company....but that doesn't stop anyone from
trying a Kickstarter for Clojure. The model might be a bit like
Flash: sell a great development tool, and put it in the middle of a
curated, complete, and documented set of libraries.

A single, coherent environment for creating web apps all the way from
database to browser would be delightful (and unprecedented).

[John Gabriele]

On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:40:12 PM UTC-4, Simone Mosciatti wrote:

 

Then still there if I write one article, you write another and @whoever write the next we will have 3 different articles in 3 different blogs, honestly I am sure that 3 articles doesn't worth 3 page of real documentation (and because in your article you cannot assume that your readers know what you are talking about, but you can do so in the second page of a wiki, and because probably the maintaners of the lib would write it better)

Another factor to consider is that folks often prefer blogging (which gives them recognition) rather than adding to a project's wiki (which tends to give the project author credit).

Phil wrote:
> It can be helpful in some cases to blog about how you got something
> working, but it's much more helpful to contribute to the official
> documentation, even if it's more work. In many cases the project changes
> in the future and third-party blog documentation ends up doing more harm
> than good.

Here's a possible solution: write your article as a wiki page in the project's wiki, while simultaneously posting it as a blog post. Have the blog post contain a link at the top pointing to the wiki article. This way:

  * the author gets public recognition for their work,
  * the blog post doesn't need to be updated (and can be kept in its current state for posterity),
  * the wiki article can be kept up-to-date, and
  * months later, readers who stumble upon the blog post can easily find the most current version of the article at the wiki.
 

Finally you cannot assume that the creators of a library will be always there to help us, they may change career, they may don't have time anymore for some stuff, they may move in Buthan, however you can be about sure that a wiki page will still.

As an aside, note that when you clone a github repo, you don't get the wiki too. :) To clone the wiki, visit the wiki and click the "Git Access" tab (though, it currently doesn't look much like a tab) for info.

---John

[Simone Mosciatti]

Ok, I guess nobody is really interested in something like that...

Never mind...