[Committers] my platform

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Just to have some information out there, even though most people already 
know what we're all about, I'll just say something about where my 
interests lie and which directions I'd like to go into if I were to be 
elected to the board. Some of it is pretty general and vague. The most 
concrete bit is that we need to fix the way we present Zope on the web.

I promise to lower taxes and free beer for everyone! um, okay, maybe not. :)

It's a bit hard to say in general now how the board will actually 
operate in practice. Much of what the board does is appointing people to 
the various councils that are really going to lead the day to day 
management of Zope. That said, that gives the board a bit of influence, 
though what that amounts to in practice I do not know. That's what makes 
it so interesting to be on the initial board - one can get to figure 
that out.

So, lots of these ideas I mention below are probably only indirectly 
related to whatever the board is doing - it's important for open source 
contributors to be able to manage themselves. Besides the ideas and 
directions I indicate below I also need to listen carefully to what the 
committers (and Zope users in general) say and want. Let me know; I'll 
probably argue with you and then adjust my ideas to make room for yours. :)

open source and roadmaps
========================

Zope is an open source project. We generally work with scarce volunteer 
resources. We should have ambitious plans but at the same time have the 
realism to get to where we want to be step by step, without 
overpromising, confusing people and without requiring massive 
development investments. We should leverage people's own interests to 
make contribution attractive. A good example of what seems to have 
worked in attracting more contributions is going to time-based releases, 
something I (among others) advocated.

In general, I think I've got some experience and ideas in this area that 
I think might be useful.

better developer marketing
==========================

I think developer marketing is an important area where Zope can do 
better. We have great brand awareness among developers, but we have a 
lot of baggage and negative ideas about Zope exists as well. We need to 
spruce up our image.

An important area of improvement is the website: Zope 2 and Zope 3 
should have a more appealing and smaller website. The current community 
based website has nice features, but I propose we replace it with 
something low-tech that looks good. I've been doing some work to get 
this process bootstrapped already.

reuse
=====

This is more a developer discussion, but it's an interest of mine so I 
thought I'd list it. The issue is how Zope relates to the Python world 
in general - Zope not being a world on its own. We can also step outside 
the Python world and look at what we could reuse there.

How to avoid the Not Invented Here syndrome? One way to make Zope more 
appealing is to make Zope more familiar to non-Zope developers by 
reusing things invented somewhere else.

We've made great progress there but we can make more progress still. 
Using best of breed components also is good when you want to market Zope 
to people, of course.

easy to get started
===================

Another developer discussion is that it should be as easy as possible 
for a new developer to get started with Zope. This is essential if we 
want to gain mindshare. This in part conflicts with the wish to use best 
of breed components which introduces dependencies. We need to carefully 
manage the conflicting pulls between the two.

I think we should look at ways to make Zope (especially 3) easier to get 
into. How to do this on the code level requires some careful design 
taking into account the managing of scarce volunteer development resources.

Zope 2 and Zope 3
=================

We've had big discussions over how to manage the whole Zope 2 and Zope 3 
story, with suggestions for renaming the platforms, the way we present 
the platform, etc. This has strong ties to developer marketing, but is 
also broader than that. We need to be careful we don't confuse people 
and the road we're on now with Five has served us quite well in finding 
direction.

That said, a course change that involves some rebranding seems required 
at some point. We need to carefully manage how we do this, given the 
limited resources we have.

Regards,

Martijn