Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
It has been our tradition to recognize an outstanding contributor in the WebGUI community each year. In the previous two years Colin Kuskie and Martin Kamerbeek have won the award. However, in the past we have not announced who was up for the award until the WebGUI Users Conference. This year we'll still announce the winner at the WUC, but we thought we'd share in advance the nominees for 2008. This will give the nominees some much deserved attention, it may inspire even more people to step up to become nominees, an it makes the whole awards process more transparent to the community.
The nominees for this year are:
Colin Kuskie - Colin is constantly helping out in both the forums and IRC. He writes tests, updates help, and has been working on the new WebGUI Shop with the rest of the team.
Kaleb Murphy - Like Colin, Kaleb is always there to lend a helping hand. But this year Kaleb has taken on the heroic task of doing a ground up rewrite of the WebGUI Survey system. Even more amazing is that he was unfamiliar with both the WebGUI API and the YUI API before this project, and learned them both in order to complete it.
Ernesto Hernandez-Novich - Ernesto has been working diligently for the past year to get WebGUI into the official distribution repository of Debian Sid. He has not only built official Debian packages and gone through the submission process (which can be quite lengthy and tedious), but has also created all of the prerequisite packages that Debian also didn't have in order to run WebGUI.
This year we're also going to add a new contributor award. In addition to the individual contributor award we've decided to do a corporate contributor award as well to recognize organizations that are putting their resources to work for the good of the WebGUI community. The nominees for the 2008 WebGUI Corporate Contributor of the Year Award are:
United Knowledge has been involved in the WebGUI Friends system, and is building a new slide show player for the new WebGUI Gallery.
El Motaheda has been working on the Arabic translation of WebGUI. And given that WebGUI is a huge system, it's amazing that El Motaheda has completed 90% of the translation work.
ProcoliX has kept the Dutch translation of WebGUI to 100% completion nearly the entire year, which is the only translation kept so up to date. In addition, they've spend a lot of time working to make the WRE even better than it already is.
Knowmad Technologies are constantly participating in IRC and on the forums. They've created and updated dozens of wiki pages, and they've contributed a number of packages to the WebGUI plugins. In addition, they've worked to make the Windows WRE work better, faster, and more reliably.
Oqapi is the largest contributor to the commerce team writing the new WebGUI Shop outside of Plain Black. They've written the payment subsystems, and two payment plugins already, and they've volunteered to write more payment plugins before the release of the new WebGUI Shop in WebGUI 7.5.
One thing to keep in mind, there are still about 4.5 months until the awards are announced. Therefore some new nominees may appear on this list between now and the WUC if they pop up with some massive contributions.
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User:
JT
Date: 4/8/2008 12:55 pm |
Rating: 2
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Status: Approved |
I should also note that there are several people and organizations that are not quite nominees, but are certainly getting there. They are:
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User:
arjan
Date: 4/8/2008 5:51 pm |
Rating: -1
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Status: Approved |
Hi JT,
Why would you nominate people or organisations? I guess that has a lot to do with this earlier blogpost; about offering people recognition for their efforts and stimulate them that way. And perhaps a bit of friendly competition may also work for some of us. ;) But who to stimulate? Of course it's obvious that there can't be enough Colins, who's an individual volunteer. But besides Colin, it's not always obvious. Perhaps that's why you decided to nominate companies as well and leave the adagium of "who commits the code is the one I know". But how visible are their contributions? Did you know that Procolix is paying for half of the Ogone payment-plugin, or that Perlero is paying for half of the work to make the UserList suitable for the WebGUI core?
I think that what you're trying to do is smart, but not easy. Personally, as I myself am representing a company, I'm looking for a different kind of recognition. The ability to discuss a contribution in advance. A discussion that ends in something like "almost certainty" that the contribution will be accepted if this organisation puts somebody or some organisation to work on it. It's something I'm trying now with the contribution you mention as well as with an earlier contribution and will be trying with yet another, before I'm writing down what I've learned in the original discussion.
But, what I've learned so far, is that there are seven criteria to a contribution:
But that's not the whole story. Even if the idea is accepted and these criteria are clear and we both know that bad quality of the code should be a reason not to put it in the core, it's still quite unclear whether one can expect it to be accepted. You were enthousiast about the alpha version of the flash-player, I'm very glad about that. But apparently there is quite some reputation needed to get the benefit of the doubt in advance. My feeling is that I *as a person* am getting recognition now that *I* am making it more clear that United Knowledge pays for recent contributions such as the development of the friends-, userInvite- and newslettersystem, a userList or a payment plugin. And you do call that United Knowledge, but - I think - only because you know I'm the owner. The recognition United Knowledge as a company got from allowing an individual developer as Leendert, to "just work on WebGUI" quite some time ago was none. As a company I'm hoping that contributions of individuals that are payed by the company, reflect on the company. The company needs it, it's the currency if WebGUI is your core-business.
Therefore my main conclusion is that it's very important to claim contributions *as a company*. Because what I am looking for is that the company is viewed as an organisation you can put demands to that you trust, by reputation, will be met. Whether it's me talking, or someone else. In exchange for certainty that if the idea is ok, if we meet the seven criteria, if we produce quality code, the contribution will - fairly certain - be accepted.
Kind regards,
Arjan Widlak
United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector
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User:
yhkhoe
Date: 4/9/2008 7:26 am |
Rating: 6
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Status: Approved |
Hello Arjan,
There's not anything specific you're saying that i disagree with. But in some cases i'm not sure why you're saying things.
You say for example: 'As a company I'm hoping that contributions of individuals that are payed by the company, reflect on the company.' Isn't that exactly what JT is trying to do by introducing the corporate contributor award? So why would you say you're hoping for something that just happened?
It's also not clear to me what your opinion on the individual contributor award is. Do you think that recognition for contributing something should go exclusively to the company instead of the individual, unless it's a 100% sure that the individual is not part of a company? That doesn't really seem realistic. I'm exaggerating here, but i'm really not sure what exactly you're trying to say.
By the way, i think a discussion about the criteria for contributions to WebGUI's core is not a bad idea. But maybe it belongs on the dev list and not in a blog on this years contributor of the year nominations. I think you might be hijacking JT's blog here. Also, when you're talking about contributions, most of the time you're only talking about contributing code. The awards JT are talking about are obviously about contributions in a broader sense.
Yung
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User:
arjan
Date: 4/9/2008 10:08 am |
Rating: -2
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Status: Approved |
He Yung,
Quote: "You say for example: 'As a company I'm hoping that contributions of individuals that are payed by the company, reflect on the company.' Isn't that exactly what JT is trying to do by introducing the corporate contributor award? So why would you say you're hoping for something that just happened?"
In the same way I'm hoping that the problem of Climat Change will be solved even after Al Gore received the nobel prize.
Quote: "It's also not clear to me what your opinion on the individual contributor award is. Do you think that recognition for contributing something should go exclusively to the company instead of the individual, unless it's a 100% sure that the individual is not part of a company?"
It's like Richard Stallman said: "Giving me the Linux Torvalds Award, is like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Army." But sure it's ok that someone receives praise, also if they do that during their work. And I hope it works, and people keep contributing even if they do not work for a WebGUI company anymore, just like ... euh. But I do hope that will happen.
Quote: "By the way, i think a discussion about the criteria for contributions to WebGUI's core is not a bad idea. But maybe it belongs on the dev list (...)"
Yes, it does, and I will. But the point is to-the-point: I don't have the feeling that contributions - of any sort - of individuals reflect on the companies that make them possible, unless you claim them very explicitly. I'm just saying that if you try to stimulate companies: I don't care half as much for a nomination, as I do for a reputation independent from an employee. A reputation that shows when someone representing that company is debating an idea. Because it's most often the company that makes contributions happen, even if the employee who most often send-in contributions of the company is replaced by someone else or perhaps the one that sends in a contribution never worked at the company at all.
Kind regards,
Arjan Widlak
United Knowledge
Internet for the public sector
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User:
JT
Date: 4/9/2008 8:48 am |
Rating: 0
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Status: Approved |
I think I've said why I'd nominate the people and organizations I've nominated, and what I hope to accomplish by announcing those nominations early.
As for how you get nominated, it's a pretty subjective process. I look at who I think has contributed the most to the community (not just in code, but also forums, irc, packages, wiki pages, etc), and pick the best of those people and organizations. However, this will become less subjective over time as we intend to eventually put up a hall of fame page which lists past winners as well as the rules for being nominated.
To the question of getting your contributions added to the core, Yung is right, that's a discussion best done on the dev mailing list so all those that may be interested in the core can participate. Certainly not everyone on the dev mailing list is also subscribed to my little blog.
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User:
koen
Date: 4/10/2008 11:45 am |
Rating: -2
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Status: Approved |
Is this blog posting the place to suggest nominations? Or should we send our suggestions to the Chief Nomination Officer privately?
Koen de Jonge - ProcoliX
http://www.procolix.com
Hosting - WebGUI - Virtualization
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User:
JT
Date: 4/10/2008 12:13 pm |
Rating: -1
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Status: Approved |
Feel free to post away. I'm certain I don't know all those that should be nominated. Please explain in detail why the person or org should be nominated in case I'm not familiar with their work.