Re: [libreplanet-discuss] [fossil-users] [OT] Who's interested in project management & collaboration tools? And...

[Michal Suchanek]

Hello,

On 5 August 2012 03:28, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> .... where are they and how do I get their attention?
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> Open source software development involves a lot of distributed collaboration
> - and I expect that many folks here, like me, are involved in one or more
> projects, and dealing with all kinds of project management administrivia.
> So.. I wonder if I might solicit opinions....

This is somewhat interesting question.

I think that you are targetting way narrower niche than you might expect.

I am not saying that project management cannot be improved.

But you must ask this question: who is the person buried in a pile of
yellow stickies that will use your software?

>From the large corporate side project managers would possibly
appreciate your software but most likely they are bound to use a
solution that is standardized throughout company. The overall attitude
is geared toward using proven and well established things.

>From the startup side - with like 3 people on the project the
contribution of some software for project organization is questionable
at best. The overall attitude is geared towards doing stuff, not
managing stuff.

>From the free software side - the number of people on any given
project is limited to like 5. Most projects either have no more major
contributors or naturally decompose into multiple parts where the
number of people involved in any given part is very low. eg. the Linux
kernel has subsystems, ...
Very few people are major contributors to more than 1-2 projects at a time.

To organize an IRC session of 3-6 people is not overly difficult, and
given the nature of typical FS schedule model of "done when done"
there is no real press. The problem seems to lie more in lack of time
and contributors than in organizing contributors.

The exception to this rule would be projects like system distributions
which both have many contributors and attempt regular release
schedule.

Note that most wikis are versioned, and some can use a vcs as backend
directly. So more permanent stuff not part of documentation that is
not to be fished in irc logs and mail archives typically ends up on a
wiki or a developer blog.

Note that Linux has eg. MAINTAINERS file in vcs directly with code,
many projects also maintain TODO.

What is hard to share with wikis and irc (if needed) is stuff like
diagrams but I don't expect richer media to be easily editable through
the web any time soon due to lack of standards.

I guess you can also expect some interest from established but not
overgrown businesses with like tens of employees.

Google tells me there are ready made commercial solutions so in cases
when enough money is involved solutions already exist. Sure, they are
possibly not on-site or not based on open standards but that tends to
appeal little to managers. They want a solution now so that their
project can be managed immediately.

And I guess you are not reaching people. How would you reach people
through kickstart is a mystery to me, tbh. It's not like people
regularly look there thinking along the lines of "what am I going to
sponsor today?"

All in all if you are project manager you can try to develop a project
management software as a hobby but expecting $65k funding from random
people does not look realistic.

Thanks

Michal