[Freeswitch-users] Call For Help: Janitor Projects

[Raul Fragoso]

Pardon my honesty, but I think you are the one who is getting this
backwards.

Firstly, I fail to see why a call for help with organizing and cleaning
up the project documentation would offend someone by simply having
"janitor" as the name. Have you ever heard the term "gatekeeper"
before ? Would it offend you ? Think again.

Secondly, FreeSWITCH is an open-source project, so forget the 'marketing
& sales' crap in the context of documentation. The success of the
project, which is growing incredibly fast, is built upon the
collaboration of the community as a whole, and it's common sense that
sharing the project tasks is a major necessary step to keep it going,
just like a janitor is of primordial importance to keep an office
building organized and clean.

Last but not the least, I agree entirely with the fact that the core
developers should be doing what they do it best, and that is, of course,
development. I see this call for help request as an effective way of
keeping them developing new features and improving the current
functionality of FreeSWITCH while sharing the burden of documentation
and organization. That's fair and sounds very logical to me. If you join
the FreeSWITCH IRC channel and hang in there for a bit you will
understand what I mean, most of the time these guys are busy responding
to user questions or analyzing use cases that could be easily solved by
checking a more organized documentation, and this is what Michael's
request is all about.

Regards,

Raul

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 02:21 -0400, mszlazak at aol.com wrote:
> First off. I would not call it a "janitors project" since that may
> offend some. A second problem is your notion that documentation is
> "not-quite-as-important" a task as writing code. I'm think many would
> say you have that backwards. There is nothing more effective in
> evolving FreeSwitch than good documentation which helps further
> development and is an important part of "customer service." Good
> customer service is then a part of "sales and marketing." Much more
> often than not, It's sales and marketing that is more important to
> making something a "real product"  than engineering. "Build it and
> they will come" almost never works.
> 
> Anyway, I think you need a new name for this project.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Collins <msc at freeswitch.org>
> To: freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org
> <freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org>;
> freeswitch-dev at lists.freeswitch.org
> Sent: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 5:10 pm
> Subject: [Freeswitch-users] Call For Help: Janitor Projects
> 
> Dear FreeSWITCH Community:
> 
> As you know, FreeSWITCH has been growing leaps and bounds and it's
> going to keep growing as the word spreads. The core development team
> of Anthony, Mike, and Brian are very appreciative of the community's
> help and involvement in the project. Simply put: the community is
> awesome!
> 
> Some have asked how they can help. Most of us are not software
> developers, but that doesn't mean we can't help to grow the FreeSWITCH
> ecosystem. To this end I've started a "janitor projects" wiki page:
> 
> http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Janitor_Projects
> 
> We say "janitor" projects because they are things that help keep the
> project clean and organized, just like the janitor cleans an office,
> takes out the trash, replaces the toilet paper, etc. These are
> valuable services that we sometimes take for granted. However, I think
> we can all appreciate that the FreeSWITCH project would be better
> served if the developers could focus on writing code, fixing bugs,
> etc. and not on the easier, not-quite-as-important janitorial tasks.
> To that end we are inviting all who wish to volunteer to please visit
> the above wiki page and check out some of the projects listed so far.
> Email me off list if you'd like to volunteer to help. I'm maintaining
> a list of "janitors" and what they are helping with. If you have ideas
> for other janitor projects then by all means email them to me and
> we'll discuss them.
> 
> Thanks again for being such a great community!
> 
> -Michael S Collins
> IRC: mercutioviz
> 
> See you at ClueCon 2009!  http://www.cluecon.com
> 
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