[kdewebdev-site] Moving forward

[Eric Laffoon]

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Hi all,
as most of you probably know I've been generally buried for some time. It's 
actually a little embarassing how far behind I am on some other site work. 
However I'm making excellent progress with vast changes, if you don't count 
all the delays from the amount of time I've spent dealing with Quanta. That 
is approaching a manageable state. Having a lot of balls in the air keeps me 
focused anyway as I become bored too easily if I'm not at 110%.

It's about 2 AM here and I'm looking through the list traffic and subscribers. 
This list has now been open 3 weeks and of course it started behind schedule. 
We currently have a total of 15 subscribers. It is my assumption that 
everyone that is here is here because they plan to be contributing in some 
way. Over the next week I intend to get the definition of roles and tasks in 
place. It is key that we quickly achieve momentum. In order to make that a 
soothing rhythm and not a cacophony I will be laying out out guidelines. What 
follows is a thumbnail.

Logically we should arrive at a conclusion for our essential layout so that 
Américo can begin on the visuals. To that end I have posted my proposal and 
as I am sure I'm not perfect I would like any comments or suggestions you 
have. If we don't have any we proceed with it as is. Also we do not actually 
have a logo other than our icons or splash and a nice logo would be a good 
thing. It would also be nice to have one that scales down for "built with 
Quanta+".

For other factors, in the next few days I will post a Knowit file 
at /home/kdewebdev which will be a central reference to our design. Our 
design will proceed targeting open and easily maintained code that produces 
exemplary markup. At this time I know Chris has some things he has been 
working on that I need to review. Our objective is to organically expand from 
our concepts and guidelines to function on an "agreeable path". This is how 
Quanta it's self runs. I do not need to review everything because we operate 
with common goals and a common undertanding of procedures. Because this works 
I intend to model it here too.

It is important to keep in mind that while I have a great deal of creativity I 
am also busy with other things. My objective is to spend as little time on 
this site as possible to do a good job. That means several things...
1) You push, I pull. I'm not inviting chaos. I'm saying that I want people 
offering creative input, code and offering to do things that clearly need to 
be done. By being proactive you can introduce things we can benefit from and 
you can reduce my required effort. What makes this work is having a solid 
feel for what you are doing and if what you're offering isn't getting good 
reviews not dwelling on it.
2) Procedures on the fly. I will outline some guidelines and objectives. This 
is a large project so just outlining it is a huge task. Since that outline 
will be somewhat rough, as we encounter areas not outlined they will be 
filled in. This means how we go about doing what we do will be shaped on this 
list, much as it has with Quanta.
3) Assistants welcome. As this process unfolds we will be keeping details of 
procedures and objectives either in an Knowit file or listed out in a private 
portion of this site. This means that anyone who can assist me in recording 
this "refinement of the plan as we go" helps to ease the ongoing maintenance 
issues and bringing in new developers.
4) Tasks and areas. One of the things I am focusing on with Quanta is getting 
people to assume roles. These can be for a task, an area of the project or a 
conceptual position that occurs across areas. The point to this is that a 
person with a high focus on specifics is likely to be more capable with those 
specifics than someone who has oversight over all. Seeing the whole project 
as I do makes me most likely to have the best over all vision, but precludes 
the likelihood of me having the best detail vision in all areas. As the 
project unfolds if you believe you have a good vision of a task, area or 
process you need to step forward.

Over the next few days I will begin making some core code commits of support 
functions that will have no bearing on overall design. They are things I've 
found useful over years of volume development. As Andras can certainly attest 
to I do not win every argument. I don't want to, unless I can prove I'm 
right. If anyone believes there is a good reason to challenge something 
coming from me they need to bring it up here or email me. I hope we can all 
be friends here, and on the off chance I might make a fool of myself I hope 
you will help me avoid that.

My objective for this time next week is that we have the following:
1) Our basic structure concluded for layout work
2) Some general support code in CVS
3) Review of some code for the site completed
4) At least 5 people committed to roles and in process of defining them
5) further outlining of base pages done
6) Initial data layout for developer section databases
7) A largely workable structure and procedures document in place to refer to

As usual I realize this won't all happen but you can't hit what you don't aim 
at.

I am looking for people to volunteer to write copy and further develop the 
site outline once we agree on the menus.

I realize some of what I'm suggesting sounds a bit chaotic. I believe in the 
balance of paradox. The best projects are carefully planned but you can't 
adjust direction on what is not in motion and momentum can exponentially 
affect volume. Ironically KDE is a very chaotic project in many ways that is 
very productive. I would like to get our team involved and I'm willing to 
deal with a little chaos as long as our chaos resolves with a common 
direction.

I've handled several other emails and some coding so now it's much later and 
I'm off to bed. 
- -- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://kdewebdev.org  eric at kdewebdev.org
Mailing list - http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta
GPG Fingerprint: 48FB 218D 747F A54A 319D EE98 4A25 794E A453 004B
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