[OOTB-hive] [ADDONS] What do we want from an Order-managed addonlisting?

Thu Aug 18 07:39:14 BST 2016

Available for a) and b)

Angel Borroy

El 18 de agosto de 2016 a las 8:34:38, Lanre Abiwon (el_gigantes at hotmail.co.uk) escribió:

I am in support of option (a) as I am unable to participate in
 option (b).
Lanre Abiwon
_________________________________________
If you do things right, people won’t know that you’ve done anything at all.

On 17 Aug 2016, at 13:57, Axel Faust <axel.faust.g at googlemail.com> wrote:

After an initial stream of replies, this topic has fallen silent again.
It has become clear that we won't come up with a plan via any form of async communication (regardless of mailing list or any "new" tool). I feel this needs some form of face-to-face communication / collaboration over a defined amount of time to work / argue this out and either come up with a common denominator plan or a redraw of what ADDONS can / wants to be.

I would like to ask everyone:

a) Would you be willing / available to do some kind of web session / web meeting in the next couple of weeks to discuss ADDON goals?
b) Would you be willing to use the next Alfresco Global Virtual Hack-a-thon (23rd of September) to discuss / finalize ADDON goals and work on an initial sets of addons to be listed / reviewed / whatever we decide to come up with?

Regards
Axel

On 25 July 2016 at 20:33, Axel Faust <axel.faust.g at googlemail.com> wrote:
First of all: Sorry, I forgot to reply to the list in my response to Tahir. I still have to get used to using Google Mail more regularly now.. Thanks Tahir for including that in your counter-response.

"So in my personal case if the plan doesn't change we still hold on to something we thought 2 years ago and didn't provide the result we wanted."

This very thread is intended to come up with a plan (or THE plan) that we can work with, which may be very different from the old one from 2 years ago.
And forgive me for saying, but "first provide result and then look on fine-tuning them" was essentially what I was trying to kickstart with my draft + reviews and see how well that turned out. So how do we go about that this doesn't happend again?

If there are other people willing to start without a plan, do stuff and come back and refine it later, I would be very happy to see that succeed. Given previous experience, I have my doubts and would wait for it to bear the first fruits, before I risk spending my time...

Kicking the entire ADDONS business to the curb and killing any intention to come up with an addon listing is a very real consideration already discussed on the board, and I personally don't have any intention as well to continue with something that just won't work. So I hope there are other people interested in this so this becomes a real discussion about plan / "what to do", and desn't remain a back-and-forth between Tahir and myself...

On 25 July 2016 at 20:03, Tahir Malik <tahir.malik at contezza.nl> wrote:
I don't think “getting our act together” is working at this moment. So probably our plans aren't suitable for us to work with, in this case I'm clearly referring to myself.

So in my personal case if the plan doesn't change we still hold on to something we thought 2 years ago and didn't provide the result we wanted.

For me personally this would mean 2 things:

1.       Get everyone in our team accepting that we need to change the way we work and maybe first provide result and then look on fine-tuning them

2.       Leave the Addons team and start a new one to still valuable contribute to the community

I have no personal issues with anyone of you 😊, but this just doesn't seem to work for me and I'm being honest and hopefully it's respected.

Tahir Malik
Sent from Outlook Mail for Windows 10 phone

From: Axel Faust
Sent: 25 July 2016 17:26
To: Tahir Malik
Subject: Re: [OOTB-hive] [ADDONS] What do we want from an Order-managed addonlisting?

You may already be jumping ahead to the inclusion of addons in Honeycomb, which isn't necessarily the same as including them in an Order-managed listing (which would be just on our web page with potentially different kinds of badges differentiating "self-certified" from "reviewed").

"First things first": Reach an agreement on what we actually want from addon listing and how we want to get there, to have a sustainable process before we exhaust / frustrate ourselves in uncoordinated actions.

ADDONS never had a problem with suggesting addons for inclusion in either the issue tracker or the wiki page you linked. I had already merged the two together to form a backlog (https://github.com/OrderOfTheBee/addons/wiki/Addon-review-schedule) of addons to be reviewed. But unfortunately, there was never any real effort on reviewing these.
Why would we need an "updated list of rules" when we never really had any formal rules except for a draft? (which by the way includes a provision for source code to be accessible, but leaves it open in what form)

One result of the discussion in this thread could be the definition of pre-conditions for an addon to be considered for inclusion in a Honeycomb distribution. This would obviously involve DISTRO in terms of how we want to provide Honeycomb (tieing into the Honeycomb vision thread Jeff started). But I'd like for ADDONS to "get our act together" and finally come up with a review / listing process that all aggree on and actually do the potentially boring, but necessary work of processing all those addon suggestions...

Jeff's suggestion was that "self-signed" would mean the addon author has reviewed her addon herself based on the criteria catalogue we define.
At that point there would potentially be very little verification / review on our part (except the really simple stuff, like license / source access / release bundling) and it might be flagged in our listing as such ("developer assures she complies with best practices but YMMV"). This "self-signed" self-registration of an addon could also act as our input funnel for a more thorough review, before we put our "stamp of approval" on it. Such an addon could then be reviewed by DISTRO for inclusion (which could be a different level in our "stamp of approval" collection).

On 25 July 2016 at 16:47, Tahir Malik <tahir.malik at contezza.nl> wrote:

Okay... still some things are unclear right now.

First things first, we need an updated list of addons:
- https://github.com/OrderOfTheBee/addons/issues/1 --> haven't been updated since october 2014
- https://github.com/OrderOfTheBee/addons/wiki/Candidates-of-our-favorite-free-open-source-add-ons --> october 2015
- Probably update the wiki of 2015 and merge those together
- https://github.com/share-extras/ --> Include all of them updated since 2015?
- What do we do with the Hackaton(s) list(s)? Are some of them ready to be included in the Honeycomb edition?

We need an updated list of rules on how we include "self-signed" Addons.
- Is having the code on github a must? I've seen multiple 'cool' addons which aren't on github, but are 'free' to use as-is

Cause these aren't addon's we've tested I wouldn't suggest just supplying them with no way of disabling them if needed by a user.
So DISTRO guys is there a way to disable certain addons on install?
We should have a configurable list of enabled/disabled addon's on installation or creating a bundle/image.

From: Douglas C. R. Paes
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 3:20AM
To: Jeff Potts, Tahir Malik
Cc: Ootb-hive
Subject: Re: [OOTB-hive] [ADDONS] What do we want from an Order-managed addon listing?

I liked the self certified add-on idea.

Em qui, 21 de jul de 2016 13:30, Jeff Potts <jeffpotts01 at gmail.com> escreveu:

One more thing...

The process I described sets up a simple hierarchy of add-ons:

Un-trusted or Self-published: Add-ons that are freely-available in the wild, on GitHub, on addons.alfresco.com, etc.

Self-certified: Add-ons that the owner says meet all of the "must" items on the OOTB Add-ons Best Practices Checklist

OOTB Approved: Add-ons that the Order of the Bee have agreed by voting that an Add-on does indeed meet all of the must items.

Jeff

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Jeff Potts <jeffpotts01 at gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think anyone is proposing that the order has to test or fix any add-on.

What is being proposed is that we have some sort of process for vetting add-ons, and Axel is pointing out that simply having a list hasn't been enough. It requires volunteers to actually look at each add-on and evaluate it against the objective criteria Axel has compiled.

I think what has been lacking are volunteers to do that work and a prioritized list of add-ons that need to be vetted.

Perhaps people who own those add-ons should be the ones to make a first pass at the criteria. Have them self-evaluate. Then they can be the one to submit their add-on to the community with a "self-certification" that it meets the criteria. The group can then spot-check their favorite "must" items and vote +1/-1 on including the add-on. A down vote due to the failure to meet a "must" item must be addressed, then the submitter can request again.

This hopefully reduces the burden on the addons committee and automatically narrows the list of add-ons to those who are motivated enough to do their own check against the list and hopefully make improvements in their code.

If we do a good job communicating the value of being an OOTB-vetted add-on but an add-on owner still doesn't think it is worth the effort to be listed, that probably means they aren't invested enough in that project. And if that's the case, we don't really want their add-on on this list. And if it's a good add-on that has simply been abandoned, some other community member can fork it, self-certify it, and submit it.

Jeff

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 6:30 AM, Tahir Malik <tahir.malik at contezza.nl> wrote:

Hi Axel,

I want to propose a different setup for our Addons community.
Instead of thoroughly testing other people's code and fixing it where needed we should add all the (functional) working Addons in the edition and fix the addons when they seem to have a problem.
This could eather be in the github issues or we forward the issues to the rightfull addon's party and help them fix it.

So what you'll get is that instead of having 3 addons, you'll have at least 15 addon's which will definitely have more value than what we currently have.

And I think we should next to Addons also add Patches to the list. I've created multiple patches in the past (and still do) on community and we should just bluntly add them and take the responsibility to fix them if needed.
If too much issues with them, discard them.

So the goal is exactly the same, only the approach it different and you'll have more result in less time and hopefully will have a compellingly more valuable honeycomb edition than we now have at the moment :).

To put this further we should have a pre-req list for these addons:
- Should be running on at least one client production system
- We should have at least tested the addon functionally
- etc.

The same for Pathes and we need to make sure that we can supply the Addons/Patches on different Alfresco Versions.
So the puppet/docker config should keep a list for each Alfresco version.

Next to this I want to in the future let our team create Addons, that could be 1 fully new addons we decide (let's say in the hackaton) or 2 pickup half working addons from the community and make it work.

Best regards, 

Tahir Shazad Malik

email

tahir.malik at contezza.nl

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+31 (0)6 14 77 50 82

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+31 (0)848 68 89 02

website

www.contezza.nl

From: Axel Faust
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:48PM
To: Ootb-hive
Cc:
Subject: [OOTB-hive] [ADDONS] What do we want from an Order-managed addon listing?

Hello everyone,

as our previous ADDONS mailing list was closed due to inactivity, it is time to contemplate the state / future of the committees work.

Initially, the committee was set up to compose, review and manage a list of Community addons / tools that we as the Order can recommend to users of Alfresco either because they fit a very specific niche of features, are qualitatively exception or simplify specific use cases immensely. In comming up with a process / guideline to review and accept addons in such a list we had some discussions about criteria but little concrete progress was made. At some point I started to compile a draft criteria catalogue (https://github.com/OrderOfTheBee/addons/wiki/Inclusion-criteria-overview) to help me structure my ideas and be used as a concrete basis for additional debate. Response had been mixed, I created two addon reviews as showcases and asked others to try and use the catalogue for their own reviews to gather feedback as well as input for potential changes (both detail or general direction).

Since then, nothing has really happened in the committee. For me it became clear that I could do little to encourage others to either try their hand at a review or come up with a concrete counter-proposal of how we want to go about compiling a list. Additionally, I was burdened with a higher load at work and didn't really find the time to continue doing reviews by myself, and neither wanted to since doing stuff unilaterally defeats the purpose of a committee / the Order. I am confident I can rectify my problem with the work load now that there'll be a couple changes in my work life. But engagement by other members is still crucial and initiative has yet to been demonstrated in this particular area.

My question(s) to you now:

Do we still (want to) consider it an objective of the Order of the Bee, to compile a list of addons / tools that have been qualitatively evaluated (in some sort), and to have that list provide added value over what is already provided by addons.alfresco.com or any potential tool that may be introduced with the new community platform?
How do we want to go about compiling such a list?
And here I don't mean minute details (GitHub issues vs. whatever task listing), but questions about "output artifacts" (what is part of the listing), "inclusion criteria", "distribution of effort", "committment to review schedule / targets"
Who wants to (regularily) take part in addons-related activities within the Order (and hasn't previously been aware of what you could do)?

Regards

Axel

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