[Gnumed-devel] project considerations

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi !

I never thought I would have to write these lines.
I realize that the following statements could start a serious debate.

Ian wrote:
>We agreed at the conference that gnumed development had proceeded a lot
>slower than we had hoped, and that
>it was important to expidite client development. We agreed lack of
>proper design and a clear development plan were
>largely responsible for this situation.

Q1: Why (if so) has the development proceeded slower than we had hoped ?
A1: lack of manpower ? - hardly you can do anything about since none of us has 
time to spare. 

A2 : lack of new developers ? Certainly !!! Just a few minutes ago  I 
pretended to know nothing about GNUmed. If you type 'gnumed' into Google you 
will be directed to www.gnumed.org. While this is certainly most wnated it 
also causes problems. www.gnumed.org needs to be well structured and most 
important up to date. Since I maintain www.gnumed.de I know how hard it is to 
achieve this. We definetely need to correct as many errors on gnumed.org as 
possible. How can this be done ? Who has access to this site? 
Is there anyone who does not code but could maintain gnumed.org (verry 
time-consuming I suppose. Ideally this person should monitor the mailing-list 
and add information to gnumed.org whenever applicable. 
I have the feeling that many , many ideas are discussed on the list but are 
lost a few days after discussion has stopped. This especially affects people 
who join the list after the discussion is over.
Interesting ideas, screenshots ect. should resurface on www.gnumed.org.

Every once in a while Karsten and I are contacted by companies who want to 
use/contribute to GNUmed. None of them has stayed in touch very long.
I believe this to be due to a lack of well defined areas they can work on.
Hopefully the will resurface once GNUmed starts getting usable.
There seems to be quite a bit of potential, although it is almost impossible 
to use it in a timely fashion. 

A3: loss of past-time developers ? There are 31 !!! developers listed on 
savannah. From what I know we have had cvs commits from 3-4 developers during 
the last few weeks. What happened ? Is it too hard to contributed to GNUmed ?
Do we need to spell out specific, well defined projects people can work on ?

A4: resources split up to much ? 
I must admit that I contributed to this one when starting gnumed.de. The fact 
is that you guys once decided that gnumed.org is for the enduser while 
gnumed.net caters developers. I honestly do not believe this is a good idea.
www.gnumed.org/gnumed.net should be identical. gnumed.org does have a section 
called 'Development'. This is the place where all the technical documents 
shoould go. Users often come to your site through search engines. Imagine 
google points to www.gnumed.net instead of www.gnumed.org. Do you really 
believe that a person who has never heard of gnumed before will be able to 
tell the difference between the two ? Let's sync it.

A5: Take a look at this one : State of the GnuCash project
http://www.gnucash.org/en/state_of_the_gnucash_project.phtml
IMHO we have very similar problems.

What can we do about this (please correct me if I am wrong) ?
1.) merge the websites, remove dead links 
2.) update the documentation , I would like everyone who has not done so yet 
to document the code he/she has written. Imagine that someone looks at your 
code for the first time. Please outline any smart concepts to thought of and 
so forth. This applies to almost every individual module in GNUmed.
We need to start writing the user manual now. IMHO this includes simple 
actions like : How do I search for a patient in GNUmed ?
3.) There is a roadmap out ! Let's enforce it. Please claim items
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/gnumed/gnumed/gnumed/client/doc/TODO/temporary-roadmap.txt
Put the roadmap on the varoius websites !! This by itself show progress.

4.) Don't get mad at me :)

Best regards,
Sebastian Hilbert