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Messages - nachico

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16
German / Re: Willkommen im Deutschen Forum
« on: December 06, 2011, 07:26:48 pm »
Hi majestyx,

for anyone to become board moderator, he needs to be proposed as a candidate to the Zentyal Community Council (ZCC), which would evaluate the candidacy and take a decision. Candidates need to have shown a commitment in the forum (measured as a minimum of 50 posts) as well as enough technical level and a willingness to help other members.

I believe you are an excellent candidate to become a board moderator and I would be very glad to personally propose the ZCC to make you moderator of the German board as soon as you reach 50 posts (it is pretty easy to reach that number).

Danke!

17
German / Re: Willkommen im Deutschen Forum
« on: December 06, 2011, 02:37:35 pm »
Vielen, vielen Dank. Deutsch-Forum war sehr notwendig. Ich hoffe, es zieht schnell :)

18
You are welcome! Now you just need to start using it ;-)

19
Hi everyone,

as many of you have probably seen in TechCrunch or many other sites, Zentyal has received a $1M+ investment from Open Ocean Capital. In our opinion, Open Ocean is by far the best investor in Zentyal at this stage, given their knowledge in open source and their experience making MySQL such a great success.

Many of you are probably wondering "ok, so what's next?". Well, it is business as usual. Although we signed the deal just last week (by the way, exactly 6 years after Zentyal/eBox became open source; isn't that destiny?) they have been unofficially part of the team for quite a long time. They are going to help the project move forward continuing the same direction, but with more resources and opening new opportunities. In fact, the 3.0 roadmap was prepared considering that the deal was going to be signed, so we could commit specific resources to the development of the product, instead of counting on sporadic availability of our guys. There you can see one of the positive effects of the investment :) You can also expect more people joining Zentyal, more promotion on the project and more presence in the main community and commercial events.

But anyway, I prefer not to promise the earth but to prove it with results :)

Cheers,

20
Hi5! :)

21
This is a very exciting conversation full of brilliant ideas that I would love to start putting into practice. Do you think it is time to stop chatting and start moving forward? :)

22
Installation and Upgrades / Re: Voice for a screencast (English)?
« on: October 25, 2011, 05:34:21 pm »
Thanks Sam! :)

23
Installation and Upgrades / Voice for a screencast (English)?
« on: October 25, 2011, 04:27:56 pm »
Hi everyone,

we have prepared a 2-min screencast on Zentyal installation and all we are missing is a nice voice that could read the script. Written communication in the forum hides the fact that none at Zentyal team is a native English-speaker, so our voice in the screencast would show an awkward accent.

Is there any native English-speaker here who could spend some time reading and recording the script we have prepared?

Thanks in advance :)

24
Installation and Upgrades / Re: Documentation sprint
« on: October 25, 2011, 01:22:56 pm »
That's a great idea! One intense week to write a book, seems hard but achievable. However, we would need to have volunteers with enough knowledge and experience available for that.

Are these manuals that are intended to be printed and sold? Or just to be downloaded on-line?

25
Makes sense, except, from my standpoint, priority management. I can't imagine some one out of Zentyal team deciding about bug priority. Well, we may need to distinguish between what is urgent (on time line) compared to what is important (in term of impact) .

Good point. I guess there can be some kind of initial filtering that helps differentiate between critical/urgent bugs, and wishlists/minor bugs. But I agree, the final decision on priority should be taken by the developers themselves.

Quote
hehe... This is time consuming for anyone willing to put his hands in. HowTo, use cases and wiki can be handled by non-Zentyal members. Core documentation must remain in your hands. It really depends on code and version and must keep some consistency. Still community members could help at reviewing such documentation.

Agreed. It makes sense that the core team keeps the responsibility for maintaining the core documentation. But proofreading and complementary documentation can be provided by contributors.

Quote
This one is an interesting one  ;) but perhaps the one that will generate huge amount of fuzz and endless debate. Look at "Zentyal Desktop": there is already a lot of debate around products and implementation in many different directions  :o  while target is still not very clear. I hardly imagine this could ever produce anything than inputs for Zentyal to make their own decision. Do not take it the wrong way. Providing such inputs is already not so bad  ;D but very far from being anything close to specs...

Well, that's the kind of situation where a SABDFL needs to use his authority ;D

So, the way I see it, is that we need first a debate (mostly done), then a evaluation of available resources (on the way), then the setting of priorities and main use cases to cover (TODO, in open discussion if possible, by SABDFL if necessary) and finally the draft of detailed specifications that would help during development (by desktop team). Does it make sense?

26
Hi Stuart,

thanks for your reply. You covered several different topics in your post, and I will try to answer one by one.

Governance

I agree that the community + SABDFL is a good balance between open participation and effective operation. I think Ubuntu has a great basic governance rules that could be directly adapted for Zentyal. We should probably simplify the organization and processes, as Zentyal's community is way smaller than Ubuntu's, but I think the basic rules fit perfectly.

Contributors "compensation"

First, let me put this straight: Zentyal as a company does not have any interest in keeping a tight control on every aspect of the project. In fact, we consider ourselves as the main sponsors of the project, in the same way as Canonical sponsors Ubuntu, but we would like the community to have its own governance rules and responsibles, part of them staff at Zentyal, part of them not.

However, you are absolutely right in raising the issue: if someone gets a commitment with the community, what does he get? In my opinion, compensation should be in the form of status, power and influence. I think the forum moderators team can provide a good example. If someone becomes a FM, he automatically gets a higher, recognised status within the community, he gets administrator rights in the forum and in the community wiki, and he gets direct access to Zentyal staff in order to raise issues, ask questions or give an opinion. As they are the only non-staff members at this moment, they also have an important influence on community decisions.

Similarly to the FM team, members of other teams should get status, power and influence. Status through a recognised title, power through administration rights on some part of the community (bugtracker, wiki, pootle, etc), and influence by having a vote in community board meetings. There are many details to refine, but this could be roughly the idea.

Desktop roadmap

Desktop is a wide and complex environment, but we need to enter there, sooner than later. The scope we can cover varies a lot on how many people we can be pushing in that direction. If this thread is successful, and we can eventually form several teams that can help in different tasks, then we can prepare an ambitious roadmap that can cover several use cases, including thin clients ;) Otherwise, we would start working on Kerberos integration and try to get it ready for 3.0. Then see what else we can do.

27
Hi everyone,

it's been quite a long time since I wanted to write this post, but never found the time. I will try to keep it relatively short so that it is easier to engage in an open conversation.

As you have all probably realised, Zentyal is becoming increasingly popular as the project matures. However, the development team has remained the same and our resources are becoming increasingly stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. As an example, there has been an extremely interesting thread on Zentyal Desktop, with a lot of bright ideas of all the things we could develop. However, the reality is that there are so many things the development team needs to do, that only a tiny fraction can be done for the next version. A poll on where our priority should be shows a strong demand on everything related with desktop integration, as well as disaster recovery, UPS support and IPv6 among others. It would take us years to cover the most demanded functionality. Unless...

... well, Zentyal is an open source project, and probably just by getting better organized we can make the most of the little time we all have available. On one hand, there is the current development team, with deep knowledge on the framework and with a company behind them sponsoring their time to continue the development and improvement of Zentyal. On the other hand, there are plenty of much needed, time-consuming tasks, that do not require so much knowledge on the framework, but that can sometimes drain most of the available time and energy from the core developers and bog down the progress of the project.

One of these tasks was, precisely, supporting this forum. Luckily, we have now the forum moderators, a team of seven members who heroically support other members and help keeping the forum alive. Zentyal developers are still participating actively in the forum, but thanks to the moderators, Zentyal can have both a forum AND a product alive and kicking. But there are many other small tasks that can easily be managed by other community members, freeing up time from the developers that can be better invested in improving Zentyal. I can see three clear examples:

  • Bug squad: handling the stream of bugs reported by Zentyal users (removing duplicates, documenting the bug case, setting the priority, etc). You cannot imagine how much valuable time could be spared if a there could be some people ensuring that bug reports are filtered, well-documented and ordered by priority
  • Documentation team: maintaining documentation for Zentyal, howtos, use cases, wiki, etc. We can only do the bare essential in documentation, but this is a task that can easily paralyse the whole development team for several weeks every year
  • Localization team: Zentyal is partially translated to close to 40 languages, far from complete, however. One of them, Spanish, is directly maintained by the development team

Apart from that, there is the possibility to create specs/blueprints teams, that work together with the core developers to design user cases and write specifications, help with alpha and beta testing and identify usability issues. A good example of such a team could be Zentyal Desktop team, to help define what to develop in the desktop-server integration and help testing it.

I could continue summarizing my thoughts on how to articulate all this, but I would prefer getting some feedback at this point and learning whether this whole thing makes sense, whether there would be people interested in giving a hand, whether someone has already thought about it and where are the pitfalls that should be avoided.

Waiting for your comments.

28
Installation and Upgrades / Re: International support - Italian
« on: October 02, 2011, 08:26:44 pm »
Hi smizzio77,

the Italian board has been around for more than two weeks and there is not a single post. I proceed to close it, as there is no point in having empty boards in the forum.

Regards,

29
News and Announcements / Poll on Roadmap 3.0
« on: September 24, 2011, 12:43:08 am »
Hi everyone,

there is a poll to request opinions on which features are the most important to include in Zentyal 3.0 (due in September 2012). Which way should Zentyal go?

Thanks stuartiannaylor for starting the poll!

30
It's a great initiative! I wish you a funny and productive day! Please, take a picture and share it on the forum :-)

Let me know whether you need anything from Zentyal team. Cheers!

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