Thomas,
I am willing to give some of my time to organize project tasks. I am not a PHP developer (I know a little) but I do web development all the time so I know much of the technology involved, such as js, xhtml and css as well as the nuances of http and the application hosting environment. I could do the work to break down the incoming bug and feature requests into the various components and drop emails to the developers who may be able to claim and work on each ticket.
But I would like some help from other volunteers as I cannot do this 8 hours a day. Perhaps once the tasks are broken out by component we can make use of component team leaders who will coordinate efforts at that level.
I would ensure that tasks are broken out into 2 to 4 hour work units so that contributors can knock out some tickets in their spare time. I would like to make it possible for 30 contributors to contribute 2 hours of work a week instead of what is currently more likely less than 10 people contributing most of the work. I would rather have those 10 take on more of a mentor and code review role to better accelerate development. As we get interested contributors we can get them aligned with the component team leads and get them started.
As a part of the mentoring, we could make use of screencast recordings and tools like Skype/Unyte. These are all free tools.
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ (screencast recording and editing) http://www.unyte.net/ (screen sharing) http://www.skype.com/ (IM and voice communications)
These tools will help the team leads put together the materials necessary to have the team members communicate with each other when we are working on a visual interface like RC. The Wink recorder can also be used to document a UI bug so that the developers can see what is happening so they can more readily correct it.
The team leads can also record a walk through for their component at the start of each major cycle to show the developers on that team the current architecture and explain the coming feature enhancements and strategies for making the necessary changes.
Brennan (www.smallsharptools.com)
On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:30:50 +0100, Thomas Bruederli roundcube@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everybody,
Looks like the others are getting closer:
Gmail like AJAX powered Web 2.0 version of IMP http://janschneider.de/news/25/252
Duroty System (BETA) is the open source Gmail http://www.duroty.com/en/index.jsp
The main problem of RoundCube is the project manager's lack of time and as a consequence of that the bad project organization, both my faults. If somebody thinks he or she could afford some time (actually it's a full-time job) and who has some experience in project management, I'm willing to give away the "power" and become a regular developer (that's what I really am).
Regards, Thomas