Re: [DotGNU]Out of list (yeah, right) - Useless edits...

[Matthew Copeland]

> Microsoft employs professional writers to create their press releases,
> and according to Dame Rumour their "grassroot's support" as well. I
> doubt Microsoft engineers can even release a white paper without the
> approval of the press department and a nod from the copy editors. Free
> Developers and DotGNU should do likewise by recruiting volunteer writers
> and editors to handle press release re-writes and copy-editing
> documentation. Ideally they would perform QA on written work for public
> release. What do you think?
> 

I couldn't agree more.  While I appreciate the work that everyone put into
the original, if we had gone and gotten some people whos talent is doing
exactly this, our press release would have been of a much higher quality.
I think that now that we have all scene the kind of quality produced by a
professional writer, we all understand the difference between the quality
that a good writer produces and the quality that a group might produce
where some of the people have less experience in that area.  Quality is an
important factor to the perception of how people will see this project.
If we can't produce quality for people to see, how are they going to trust
us with the quality that they can't see.  The same obviously goes for FD.
So, rather than all of us trying to dip into areas where are experience
isn't as great or where we don't have talents, let's work on the areas
where our talents area t, and recruit the people who have the talents we
need.
        Just another note, this press release was premature.  It should
have waited until we were far more organized.  Remember, part of our main
audience is other developers.  A perceived lack of organization by outside
developers is not going to benefit us.  Ohh well, I am not going to mince
words about it.  I think that so far we haven't had enough organization in
getting things done.  Rather than talk about all the things that we could
do for dotGNU, I am going to through out the opinion that we first need to
get organized into managable groups where each group is set to go
investigate some topic and come back with a specification for what they
think the best way to handle that problem.  It would cut down the clutter
on the main list, and would get the ball rolling a little better for the
discussion on specific topics on sublists.

        The sublists don't need to be perfect, but they do need to be
there, so if the person who has the control of the lists, and the
person/people who are supposed to be at the head of the project can get
together and make up the lists to discuss the different important topics,
(including archiving please) it might make things go a little more
smoothly.  I am not tring to give the head people a hard time.  I am just
saying that it needs to be done, and we need to stop talking about it and
get moving.  Once those lists are created, someone can write up a basic
template for what kind of document should be returned to the main list.
That way we can take the document and put into CVS.  Some programmers
aren't very good at writing press releases, but I have found that a good
number of programmers can at least write specification documents for how
things should work and why.  (Of course, some do it badly, but at least it
would be a start.  Something that we could REALLY discuss.)

Matthew M. Copeland

p.s.  Feel free to ignore my rantings and ravings about being organized if
you like. I just have found that in other projects, it is useful so I am
trying to encourage it.  If you want to hit me off list for a list of
possible development lists from what I have observed to be the important
issues, feel free.  You can then take them and use them how you will.