On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, Ian Trudel wrote:

> Dear Squeakizen,
>
> I would like to call for your opinion(s) in regard to contributions. I
> am a firm believer in surveying the community in order to improve our
> sense of direction, our culture, and bonding as a community.
>
> 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak?
>
> 2. What would it take for you to contribute more?

These two are related. I've been toying with Squeak since some time around 
2000, and used it commercially since 2003/4. I'm using Seaside to build 
web stuff, so from that point of view, Squeak has been "feature complete" 
(it can read files, send bytes over sockets etc) for me for years already. 
The only significant improvement would be a faster VM, but that's outside 
of my competence.

I know people have all kinds of visions for doing things in Squeak and 
work towards that, but I don't. So what would make me contribute would be 
having some sort of project/problem I'm interested in, from which I could 
take potential contributions. When I started doing web stuff, I needed 
Glorp to interface with my databases, so got involved with porting it to 
Squeak and mantained the port for few years.

Technically I don't see hurdles to contributing. The trunk process is easy 
enough.

> 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions?

That they don't mess up my workflow. That's what I'm mostly doing these 
days - reporting bugs and screaming when people alter some long standing 
behaviors (e.g. reusing browser windows instead of opening new ones).

> 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from
> other community members, according to you?

lack of time

> 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of
> contributions and the number of contributors?

some kind of sponsorship, the same way large companies employ people to 
work on open sores projects full time (linux, postgres etc)

also, I think a big problem with communication on squeak-dev is that 
people just WON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE EMAIL SUBJECT to what they are 
talking about, so you see long threads discussing 3-4-5 completely 
different topics during their lifetimes. So you either have to read 
everything (which is tiresome/costs time) or simply miss stuff that you 
might care about.

> 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the
> Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the
> highest)

4

> 7. What is your rating based on?

I like powers of 2, but 8 seemed too high

> 8. Anything else?

maybe some people are uncomfortable speaking up so you should say it's ok 
to respond to you privately too

rado