Collaboration

Redshaw said that rather than an age bias, he noticed more of an executive level bias to collaborative efforts: the higher up in the company's hierarchy the less social networking technologies get used. "That's a good thing," he said. "The real work gets done not in the board room."

Let's face it. Most of us out here in the open source community are getting a very good deal. We are fortunate to have bright people building software for us at little to no charge. If we begin to depend on these freely given gifts, we should never make the mistake of then assuming the one giving the gift is somehow accountable to us. Gifts given should be received with gratitude and an expectation of nothing further. Nothing. And, if we aren't able or willing to help, the least we can do is try not to ruin the fun!!! Thanks, Bèr! I appreciate your article very much.

This morning I found an email in my inbox telling me that I am a bad maintainer and that I am making people fork my modules. The mail was not meant to go to me, but the sender hit reply and thought he was moaning about me to someone else. Basically I was asking for my modules to be forked because I was too ### to release a new version. I don’t release a version unless I am confident it is release-worthy: when I have used it myself. Not a big deal, but it gave me food for thought about maintainance and release of Drupal modules, in general. And about how to improve the general issue of not having enough time to dedicate to a contribution In general, I think there are three reasons to maintain a module on Drupal.org You think it is fun or/and like to “give something back” It allows you to have your module improved without having to invest much time and money It works as marketing for you, as a highly visible portfolio: people see you, see your work and therefore might hire your services.

It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

confluence

simple items which can interact and be managed with one other

Information is the substance of their work and more information is the output of their work: Research, proposals, priorities, direction and decisions?

knowledge is gained and shared

how people actually work