[OOTB-hive] CE looking bad?

[Richard Esplin]

I read Gab's response after I sent mine. I guess it's expected that we would 
have a common perspective.

He mentioned JIRA and contributions, so I want to provide a little more 
context.

I have been working on improving our contribution process, but have been more 
focused on the Community Edition release strategy. Here are some results so 
far:

* I spent a lot of time last month revising the instructions in the wiki to 
make it clearer how to collaborate with our team and how to contribute back. 
There is still a lot of work to do here.

* We have started moving more projects to Github and you can see the 
Engineering team being more open about accepting contributions to projects 
like Aikau and Mobile.

* As a group, we tried to improve the permission scheme in JIRA to give more 
rights to non-employees and reduce the number of steps in the various 
workflows. But instead we ended up breaking everything. I think JIRA is 
basically functional again, but it will take a while before we can role out 
improvements.

We are going to continue this process of incremental improvements. As a team, 
we have been experimenting with a lot of approaches to see what works. Some 
have caused more problems then they have solved, and some have succeeded in 
different ways which creates conflicting governance models that make it hard to 
collaborate. It's a bit chaotic, but hopefully you agree that we are moving in 
the right direction.

Thanks,

Richard

-- 
Richard Esplin
Product Manager, Alfresco Community Edition
Tel: +1 801 855 0866
Mobile: +1 801 735 4220
Skype: esplinr

On Thursday, May 21, 2015 14:03:34 Gabriele Columbro wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have to say I am again very concerned of these discussion and once more
> puzzled by the lack of data driven considerations but a lot of 'i have the
> feeling', 'i think', 'etc etc etc'.
> 
> That page existed on the Alfresco website for years so it's surprising to me
> all this fuzz now.
> 
> Alfresco is open source and there are strong supporters of it in the company
> so I have to say I feel personally offended by some of the unfounded claims
> done in this thread and in general the most annoying thing is this
> continuous referring to Alfresco as 'them' vs. the community being 'us’.
> How does this leave people like me who are in both and working to build a
> lively collaboration? Do you really want to work together to govern this
> ecosystem or just be the 'opposition’? (both very valid positions, but
> let’s just be clear here).
> 
> My perception might be biased, although all of you know I am an open source
> and community supporter at heart, but I want to just mention a couple of
> data points:
> 
> - until 6 months ago, Richard was the only person looking after the
> community and only from a marketing standpoint. Now we have him to run
> Community as a Product, from Product Management, while a Community
> Marketeer was hired to cover the marketing side
> 
> - until 6 months ago, there was no Developer Platform team, pretty much only
> me developing the SDK in my free time (and BTW other than Ole, with very
> very little contributions): now I run that in PM, Ole was hired to help
> evangelize and bridge, Martin and and engineering team are dedicated to it
> 
> - more and more projects are open in jira and welcoming comments and with
> release agility I am trying to also get our codebase to a state where a
> seamless contribution process is possible (on top of having a better QA,
> not worse, on GA releases of Community). This is the trend we are trying to
> set within the new PM organization, all around validation and an
> orchestrated, repeatable feedback process and valuing community through
> different feedback channels (jira, office hours, etc)
> 
> - I do sincerely think we (and I mean everyone, no us and them) should have
> built years ago a much more collaborative process to accept contributions,
> which I think it's a key vehicle to have a lively, unified and productive
> community ecosystem. I want to believe this is the main reason why almost
> 100% of the Alfresco code is written by Alfresco employees and why instead
> there's never been substantial Community contributions to the core product
> (other than the HTML5 previewer, for which Loftux needs to be widely
> recognized). Honestly though, from the lack of help I received over the
> years on the SDK, I also have some doubts on the maturity of this community
> on the process needing to be two-ways (comparing for example with very
> different but much more mature communities I belong to, e.g. The ASF)
> 
> - I would really like to understand where you feel Alfresco is becoming less
> Community friendly? Is that because of AOS? Yes, I agree, that was not
> dealt with in the best way from an expectation standpoint, but was a
> tactical choice rather than indicating a bigger change of strategy. The
> admin consoles? Human mistake, now reverted, and solved structurally by
> adding a Community PM to guard on these topics. What else am I missing? Can
> you please show me some data here provide the trend is going in a different
> direction? (as I said I might be biased, as I have access to all the
> internal WIP strategies and but also very familiar with the stress our
> sales have to cope with to sell enough and keep on delivering for free a
> large amount software to the community).
> 
> I guess what I'd like to see here is a more positive spirit, from a
> Community who is receiving for the last 10 years copious amount of
> software, rather than always having this confrontational / entitlement
> sense. I mean if 'we' are so bad, why we are all still here?
> 
> I do think there's room for monetizing Community as well as Enterprise and
> the target audiences are completely different. Don't forget that even in
> Enterprise deals, the slice of services sold around Alfresco is typically 3
> to 10 times higher, and with Community you guys have the opportunity to
> monetize that fully.
> 
> All I am trying to say is: keep the feedback coming but also keep the spirit
> and attitude up, because there are people that work inside Alfresco to
> build on that spirit and get a better product (Community and Enterprise) in
> a daily basis.
> 
> For example, I am working a lot to fix the extension model and
> supportability of our APIs so to build a lively ecosystem everyone can
> leverage, and I am trying to be as communicative as possible on this,
> otherwise I fear that if we keep with this disconnect (us vs them), the
> OOTB will go off an build something (e.g. the honeycomb) which is based on
> an obsolete model we all know needs fixing.
> 
> The net net is: help “us” (Alfresco) help us (the Alfresco + Community
> ecosystem)  :)
> 
> Hope this makes sense to all of you, and comes across the right way, as my
> objective is to have an harmonious collaboration generating a dynamo of
> positive effects (rather than a vicious spiral), if nothing else for
> personal peace of mind in my dual role of Alfresco employee and long
> standing community member :)
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to read this,
> 
> Gab
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On May 21, 2015, at 9:39 AM, Cristina Martín Ruiz 
<cristinamartinruiz at gmail.com <mailto:cristinamartinruiz at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > I'm agree with you, Andreas but when I wrote "to us" was concerning to
> > their strategy: The value of the community has become "us": We are the
> > ones that are continuing and trying to maintain that value... In my
> > opinion, Alfresco is changing a lot their strategy, and I can be agree or
> > not (this is other topic), but what I know is that OOTB is doing a good
> > work in the community of Alfresco.
> > 
> > Sorry if I haven't explained well.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Cristina.
> > 
> > 2015-05-21 15:26 GMT+02:00 Andreas Steffan <a.steffan at contentreich.de
> > <mailto:a.steffan at contentreich.de>>:> 
> > On 05/21/2015 03:18 PM, Cristina Martín Ruiz wrote:
> >> > ... I don't quite understand where they are trying to drive CE.
> >> 
> >> To US, Andreas ;-)
> > 
> > The product? Really? I thought it's just the conference going to the US.
> > ;)
> > 
> > May the future enlighten me.
> > 
> > cheers
> > Andreas