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

[MLO]

JP,


I dont care anymore so no more.

Peace!

:)

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 4:45 PM, <jp at nexedi.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Erp5-users mailing list
> Erp5-users at erp5.org
> https://mail.tiolive.com/mailman/listinfo/erp5-users
>
>
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