Talk:Rotterdam Mini-Collective

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Improving the Rotterdam Goals

A Few words from John Bates

Current Main Objectives of the Collective

  • Focusing on the core functionality (couchsearch, groups, email, meetings)
  • Planning the technology infrastructure needed to support future website growth.
  • Reducing the number of bugs from 400 to 100.

Proposed Main Objectives

  1. Improving the current infrastructure - setting up System Administration, Database Management and Core Developers teams. This will help us to maintain and upgrade servers, restructure the database, and create a valuable commit/deployment system.
  2. New Developer Training - A plan to bring in and properly support new, high-quality, potentially long-term devs.
  3. Core Functionality - Work will be done to improve upon existing core pages and to participate in the current core projects of our virtual team.


Proposed Main Objectives Notes

  1. I think infrastructure is the priorty. - A very nice outcome of the collective (if not before then) would be to have at least a minimal sysadmin/database management team in place including a server monitoring system and community-developer-request response system. Upgraded servers. Restructured database. Good commit/deployment system. A growth plan.
  2. New Developer Training (a.k.a Dev Boot Camp). - We are badly understaffed and not able to adequately respond to the needs of the community. But, I think patience is required and a plan to bring in and properly support new, high-quality, potentially long-term devs. A Dev Boot Camp would both attract new devs and give them proper support. As well as getting some bugs fixed, which are a good way to train devs and improve the site at the same time. But the emphasis should not be on fixing x bugs in y time.
  3. Core Functionality - I think it's OK to mention work on core functionality, but not specific pages that are already in decent shape. Any work done on pages like mapsurf or meetings should be done as an adjunct to the existing efforts, not in place of them. I think it would be unfortunate if, for example, someone comes to the collective expecting to have the opportunity to soup-up the mapsurf page, when there is already a plan and a community group forming to evolve this page to the next level. Certainly, anyone at the collective would be welcome to participate in the ongoing project, but this project is independent of the collective (and should be -- aren't we trying to create a sustainable virtual development effort?).
  4. A collective, if necessary at all, should focus first on things that are done best with in-person meetings, or to concentrate an intense cooperative effort on a neglected area that could feasibly be dealt with in a limited time frame.

Improving Rotterdam Communications

Anu's comments

  1. the communication infrastructure of the collective is detrimental to its success.
    1. An IRC channel where all the devs present there hang out, and using this list for any internal communications would go a long way in keeping the rest of us included.
    2. As always, a newsletter sent out bi-weekly or meeting minutes once a week isn't really enough for sustainable team-work. Neither is assigning one "communications person" - this creates an unnessary bottleneck when we all could just "hang out" virtually. Keep in mind this in with experience of 2 collectives...

Possible Projects

  1. SQL Injection testing - http://www.security-hacks.com/2007/05/18/top-15-free-sql-injection-scanners
  2. Group improvement - create thumbs-up, thumbs-down to systems for group posts --EmoriginalTalkCS 16:52, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
  3. Increasing Couch Request Efficiency - One-click "not available" responses, busy/available calendars, better design so that users know diff between "sending an email" and "requesting a couch" --EmoriginalTalkCS 16:52, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
  4. CouchSurfing Member Appreciation page - Randomly showing current core volunteers, what they're doing, acknolwedging current surfers, and hosts(maybe based on recent friend connection), programmers, designers, etc. Pushing "how I participate" to a global view and encouraging people to give others positive compliments on their efforts. --EmoriginalTalkCS 17:01, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
  5. Direct Emailing - Members would be able to send from website to others inbox, the user would directly reply to that email, it would go through CS servers, be interpreted using python mailman, and sent to the other user. Craigslist.org uses anonymous email addresses, so could we to prevent each user having to know each others email. Cs just acts as a middleman for communication --EmoriginalTalkCS 17:01, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
  6. Group Tips - Each group would be linked to wiki page, especially location based groups, would have top questions, top tips, so that new users could be pointed to that page. Got a question? Look at the correlating wiki page first. This would allow a knowledge base of info to be built around that group. --EmoriginalTalkCS 17:01, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
  7. Visual CouchSearching - The way you select the type of people, alters a figure of the person you are searching for. more ideas later
  8. Implementing a strong page ownership model gear the community side of the dev department toward this. -- John Bates
  9. Picking up the CS Blogs project again - detrimental for consistent collective updates and could help bridge the information gap when put in use in other areas of the organization as well -Anu
  10. New Users auto join groups, ambs send mass messages to local areas - http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429
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