plans I realize how much there is to be done. It is all exciting, movement at last.I'm taking a shot at shifting how OU communicates with the community. I'll suggest that OU has the rep of being hard to navigate because of the orientation of people that set OU up. That is not a slam. You guys are good and have made an excellent resource for the community. We are in a text based medium and the projects and design specs are all text oriented. One really has to get deep into this stuff to understand what is happening. But, 40-45% of the population are visually oriented and reading is just a necessary evil.
Hopefully we can provide a better way into the projects OU plans to support and a better means of finding one's way around. The new menus and forum, wiki, and etc. arrangements are a considerable improvement. I think the site is much much easier to use and find one's way around in.
Those involved deeply in the project(s) know where things are. new people don't and it is a continual frustration between the new and experienced getting people sync'd. I would like to find a way to make it easier for new people to get up to speed. Hopefully less time will be wasted trekking over the same ground as new people come in.
Getting new people on the path and keeping people on some path (or paths) and providing places where people with various talents can participate depends on keeping the plan visible and prominent. On the MOUL forum we already see many of the conversations we’ve had over the last year starting over. I think that is because new people are unaware of the previous thinking and discussions.
Lots of reading is needed to figure out what has been discussed. It is more effort than many will put in. Even then there are no conclusions to say what is going to be done. Or even which group is doing what. I think it is obvious we have never structured the conclusions, if any, or possibilities from those discussions. The information either fit into a forum or wiki or remains inside someone’s head. Many of us that have been around have it in our heads. None of it is easy to find. Especially if it has not occurred to someone that something they are interested in has already been done, which seems to be a common human failing.
Now would be a good time to plan avoiding a repetition of behavior that doesn't address a know set of problems.
I’ve looked through Karl Fogal’s P.O.S.S. All the details of what one does in such a project is covered. It looks great for programmers, its target audience. I’ll suggest that programmers tend to be more left brained than right brained. The artists and creative types tend to be more right brained. If the project is planned in a software spec and dev guides the artists are going to find it way difficult to use and understand.
One step we can consider to get information out where people can see it is use of critical path (CP) planning. Do we have a CP tool in OU?
I’m thinking of how to provide a means for people to jump in at various places. The path for Max, Maya, and Blender modelers are all different. Programmers for client, server, python will have different interest that fit in at different places. Bug fixes and especially feature additions will need prioritization. Some map of the project that is more visually oriented is far easier to use. While such maps are more of a pain to create, they enable people to come into a project and understand it. The easiest mappaing I can think of just now is CP. With a CP diagram we can see how things fit together, their priorities, and keep progress visible. Also, the path could have links to the related sections of forums or wiki. It could serve as an entryway into the project.
I am thinking of anything more graphical than pure text based planning so it is easy to see and find one’s way around what is a massive project with nearly infinite detail and numerious pathways.
Or may be we just manually diagram the process and use the diagram as a map into the projects.
I’m beginning to think God had it easy. This is certainly going to take more than 7 days. He apparently had better development tools.
Ideas?
