Re: side projects and sub projects

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 26 Feb 2016, at 17:27, Patryk Laurent <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
>> On Feb 26, 2016, at 09:08, Richard Frith-Macdonald <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> Would it make sense to maintain a table listing all these 'projects', 
>> describing their aims, reporting their status (active, maintenance, wishlist 
>> or something like that), giving links and contact details (maybe even a 
>> signup mechanism) for people to get involved and coordinate with each other?
> 
> Would refreshing this task list and linking to it directly from the GNUstep 
> website help?
> 
> http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?group=gnustep

I see what you mean, but that's not really what I meant;

I know I said some of the projects I was talking about are currently just 
wishes (and some of the items on the savannah wishlist are the sorts of 
projects I was talking about), so there's clearly overlap, but I was meaning 
that we might highlight a relatively small selection of the larger things that 
groups of people might want to get involved in together,  particularly ones 
which might feed back into publicising/popularising GNUstep.
I am trying to think of projects with the potential to inspire small groups to 
work together, and I was trying to suggest some of the things that varioius 
groups might *want* GNUstep to be.
Over many years listening to the discussion list it seems to me that;

Lots of people want a GNUstep desktop environment
Some people want to produce native-feeling windows apps
Some people want to produce native-feeling gnome or kde apps
Some people want to be able to work with OSX tools but deploy on 
Linux/unix/windows
Some people want to use the latest OSX APIs
Some people want to work on better new stuff than OSX

I guess what I'm struggling to identify are the major groups of GNUstep users
More precisely, I suppose, the groups of potential users; people who want to 
use GNUstep but for whom it's not yet good enough.

Of course, I want to make sure GNUstep doesn't focus entirely on side projects, 
and continues to do the job I need it for every day;  providing a powerful 
framework for people to build their own software in ObjC
But it would be great if we could encourage and provide support for people to 
work on their own project areas, because I'm sure that would also feed back.

It might also help to clearly separate those areas of course.

I'm mostly trying to generate some ideas about how we can differentiate major 
targets from the core of GNUstep, and get them going more.

eg.
Perhaps we could do something like humorous recruitment advertisements for 
posts in each project ... as if they were normal paying jobs, saying what 
qualifications are needed and describing each post (what would be involved and 
what the benefits of the job are etc).
That's a big step beyond having a table with project descrioption, status and 
contact details, and maybe it's a silly idea,
 but ... Is there anyone from a recruiting agency on this list?