[Erp5-users] Project management style (was: What companies provide Erp5 Technical Support since Nexedi doesn't?)

[jp at nexedi.com]

Hi,

Here are some replies and some informations.

> around ERP5, community support is next to none, community contribution
> is next to none (as even Nicolas pointed out while talking about wiki).

Significant community contributions were made outside Nexedi :
- cloudooo document conversion server 
- complete translations of ERP5 in portuguese
- Petri-net based modeling of NEO distributed storage (http://www.neoppod.org/) 
- Various accounting plans and localisations business templates
- ERP5 eGov, e-government system
- Audio and Video support in ERP5
- raskon buildout and wiki pages

Community support :
- Nexedi replies to questions to mailing list (for example, to you last year, for a significant issue you raised)
- Nexedi provides for free TioLive Grid to simplify initial ERP5 configuration (this saves many hours)
- raskon & friends supports users of raskon buildout and raskon wiki pages

I do not know if TioLive counts as community, but thousands of people have received free support through TioLive.

> This is clear for anyone who takes a look on the mailing list. The key

Most community work happens for ERP5 outside the mailing list, through personal interactions between people who know each other quite well. This has the advantage to protect the trade secret of certain large users of ERP5 and to minimize the effects of Philippe's Law (the productivity of a software developer in a team of N people is diminished by dividing it by the cube root of N). It has the disadvantage that some people thus believe there is no community although there is.

> question is: is Nexedi happy about it, or not? 

Nexedi is happy that people outside Nexedi already made significant contributions and would be happy to see more.

To make sure this happens, Nexedi is sponsoring the "One Student One ERP" (www.osoe-project.org) project in universities all over the world. By training students to understand ERPs in general and get some practice with ERP5, we expect to increase the number of people capable to contribute in the long term to ERP5 and use it without Nexedi's support. We also hope to raise the awareness of how tough implementing an ERP can be for social reasons.

> them by raising issues, asking questions, lobbying for tickets,

Nexedi welcomes questions. Our resources are limited so it is not possible to reply to all of them. But we try.

> like. Recent change in the way documentation is managed - from wiki,
> to which some people (like me) did in their time contribute a lot -
> towards a closed documentation repository - seem to confirm it. But for

The documentation management did not change unlike what you describe.
- developer howtos are hosted on the wiki (www.erp5.org) which provides easy way to community to contribute
- end user documentation is hosted on erp5.com which provides a good conversion engine for the tutorials

Once erp5.com can provide the same level of contribution support as moinmoin wiki, content will be moved to erp5.com. But not until it can provide the same level of ease for community.

> real "community project" (or even an open source project) because
> that is cheating people.

ERP5 is a real community project. It meets all the criteria of a community driven project as defined here: http://almaer.com/blog/community-driven-open-source

- committers from outside of Nexedi (ex. ERP5 eGov, Video)
- cleaning up documentation for the community (erp5.com documentation index)
- users who have helped with the documentation (you for example, people in Brazil)
- some kind of forums/lists where people help each other (this one for example)
- a lot of effort to build your community to get true benefits (OSOE project, training developers in Africa)

Of course, we could always do more. But it would be unfair not to recognize the efforts made and the progress towards more community in recent years.

> Otherwise - if you are not happy about it and would really like this
> project to have an active developer and user community - please state
> what you are going to do to make it happen. Open Source is truly not

In order to progress further towards larger community, here is what Nexedi is going to make happen:
- more OSOE (please help on this, please help a lot)
- publication of ERP5 roadmap
- publication of bug tracker by investing time of Nexedi staff to cleanup bug reports from any sensitive information
- migration of ERP5 repository from subversion to a DVCS (git seems to be the favoured one) so that more people can fork ERP5 and merging later gets simplified
- migration of TioLive FAQ to erp5.com 
- release of new applications based on ERP5 which do not require as much knowledge of management and are easier  to grasp by developers than a full ERP
- funding of joint R&D projects based on ERP5 (feel free to contact me if your company is in EU, Russia, Korea, Israel, Swiss, Norway or Brazil, there are some good things to do)

I think it is also now a good time to define the purpose of ERP5 mailing lists:
- erp5-user to explain how to use the default configuration of ERP5, ie. the one which is provided by TioLive through this bt5 (http://svn.erp5.org/erp5/trunk/bt5/erp5_configurator_standard/) by improving documentation and howtos
- erp5-dev to explain how to develop with ERP5 by improving documentation and howtos
- erp5-discussion for other topics (for example, this thread should go there from now, so that users can help each other)

This way, people interested in using ERP5 ask questions to erp5-user and help improving the FAQ. Developers ask question to erp5-dev and help improving erp5.org developer howtos. Nexedi can invest time on both FAQs to help the community.

> difficult to learn what it takes to make an OS project at least
> developer-friendly. This book: http://producingoss.com/ can be a good
> start.

Karl Fogel provides one point of view on what is a community. There are other point of views. 

The path chosen for ERP5 community, a path in which mailing list is less important than friendly relations between an ever expanding group of engineers in different companies and countries, has its own merits which should not underestimated. What is happening in Brazil, in Sénégal, in France and some more countries shows how important it is to meet most people in person to convince them how ERPs and ERP5 can be useful. Without face to face meeting, people and especially developers only see ERP5 as a development tool and often have no idea how to use it to handle complex social organisations. Thanks to face to face meeting, it is easier to transfer know how and underlying philosophy of ERP5.

About communities, I am very much interested in this article by Brian Prentice:
http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/11/03/open-source-business-apps-is-there-a-disconnect/

The real issue to build a long term ERP5 community should be to bring companies which already use ERP5 to collaborate on how they use ERP5, how they could improve their business rather than keep in a situation in which each company customizes ERP5 to their needs and does not try to share knowledge. This is still an open issue because of the conflicts with the notion of trade secret. Yet, I have good hopes to find a path some day.

Regards,

JP Smets.
Nexedi CEO