Communication

[The Jo]

Until now I have not figured out how the communication systems of the orxonox project work. Or in other words I believe there are several ways to improve communication.
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I already know that we have the forums (it's very interesting to read old threads here) and the irc channel (I've already recieved immediate help when I tried to install orxonox - unfortunately I've forgotten how to find the irc-channel And what I've almost forgotten is the mailing list I've subscribed - it's because I haven't recieved any mail yet.)

What I miss is regular one-to many communication and an easy to use one-to-one communication system.
As a PPS student I've recieved a concise briefing about orxonox. But after the introduction period there hadn't been any further announcements at all. (Or at least I think so.) For me it's quite exciting to hear what's going on at the project. The most important stuff is to know what the current and the long term goals are. (Is there a "master plan"? ) And to trigger a common discussion about how to reach these goals. If there's a plan that doesn't mean that it has to remain unchanged.

I've already tried to get in contact with other PPS students whenever there was a common topic. But I believe there could be a much deeper exchange of knowledge, if there was an easy to use communication system which enables to address a single orxonox contributor.

On the wiki I was working every user has it's own talk page, where other users can leave a message. Whenever you recieve a new message a link to your talkpage is displayed on top of each wiki page until you've read the new message. Under each message there is a link to the author's talkpage.

This is just an example to make it more clear what I meant with "easy to use" one to one communication system. Of course it would be sufficient to know each other's email addresses.

All in all communicating more would make this PPS more social and it would increase the feeling of being a part of a big project.

[x3n]

its true, there is currently no communication channel which is used active.

the forum can be used to tell other people what you're working on (see the subforum Developers' Journals - but as you can see, the oldest post is 1-2 years old, so in other words, nobody felt like sharing his development experience).

our irc channel (irc://irc.orxonox.net/orxonox or our webirc [beta]) is mostly in german and we use it to discuss our daily problems (life, studies and coding).

last but not least (and probably currently the most important source of information) is the commit mailinglist. at least the main developers use the commit messages to add background information about commits and new features or heavy changes.

its true that its quite an inconvenient way to retrieve most information about the development progress through commit messages, but on the other hand most developers are too lazy to write essays about their code (most are even too lazy to write proper documentation), so i think its not really a lack of communication channels but rather a lack of motivation sometimes.


btw, yes, there is a very rough master-plan for the first release, but i'm not sure if it's written down somewhere. at least it exists in our minds and it boils down to "fix all the relevant stuff and add some levels"

[greenman]

well there are 2 threads about the upcoming realease (here and here). the problem is, that there hasn't been any status update recently.

i think x3n is right, that this is mostly because of a lack of motivation

[The Jo]

I myself believe that we have to do a lot to create a good community around our game. At the moment a lot of students never come back to development team and the Orxonox career (that cool graphic that x3n created some semesters ago) is just a theory for most people.

In my opinion is causes too much work if you don't communicate. You'll hardly get anyone to join in, if you do not get them enthusiastic about orxonox.
Not communicating is a lack of culture.
A first step to overcome this shortage is to encourage PPS students to communicate.
Example 1: If someone has finished a project, he should add a thread in the forums explaining what he has done and think about how other student's projects could benifit from the finished work.
Example 2: A student can write a howto about his project for other PPS students.
Please don't be lazy - you don't have to do much to achieve a lot.

[Mozork]

That could be a PPS project for next semester.

I agree with a lot of points you raise, I especially think, that to gain momentum (through external support and participation) our website will have to become more interactive and more connected.

And here comes the "But": But I for one have more than enough to do for orxonox as it is, so it just isn't a priority for me at the moment and I think that is true for the other assistants as well.

Encouraging the PPS students to write about their project at the end seems very reasonable to me and is (in my opinion) something we should do. Also I think howtos are great, that is why I do them for all my bigger projects but that is a matter of time and motivation.

There is one thing about communication that none of you mentioned and that I think is great really for orxonox. During the PPS hours you can just walk up to anyone who's project you want to know better and ask him about it, I'm sure he'd be happy to tell you what he's done so far. This direct communication between developers is something many of the open source communities I know don't have on a weekly basis. On the downside it just includes the assistants and the PPS students, but for now that's almost all there is.

[beni]

It should not be a surprise to anyone that I like this thread . After all, I already got quoted for noticing this problem. I wasn't part of the PPS for a long time now, but I do remember, that at the beginning every student presented his work to everybody once in a while (not sure if it was every lesson, but we did it very often). Like this you get to know the people behind the projects. I mention this, because I think it's kind of difficult for a student to go to somebody else and ask him about his project. If however the group comes to every student and looks at the work, everybody gets to know everybody else and their work. This is very nice to give the people a feeling that they work in a team. It is also an alternative to the rather impersonal developers' journals.

I recently talked to a friend and we noticed, that we may not meet each other that often if we haven't met in the Orxonox PPS in 2005 and became real good friends with everybody in this year. Even today I meet about 90% of the original PPS students very often and we are best friends.
Now this is maybe too much to ask for, but the general idea seems to be a good one. The PPS assistants at that time never worked on their individual projects during the PPS and instead used the time to help everybody else and to discuss the work. When one of the students had created something cool, they would call out for everybody so every student in the PPS could see how cool that new feature was. Instead they worked during the night or in their free time.

I think the general problem of lack of documentation is a separate problem and can be found in the best projects in the world.

For the channels for communication I think that the commit-mailinglist is rather tiring to read and not very good for a one-to-many communication.

In the early days we had an "announce" list for major announcements and "developers" list as well where developers could discuss stuff in general (okay, now we have the forum for this, don't we?).
I criticized before that none of any of those channels are used. Especially things that can be looked at from outside are rare. Most communication is private which is confusing for people who want to get an insight into this project, like "The Jo".

However I see an even bigger problem! With lack of open and public conversations the original ideas and ways are dying. How would the project lead in two years know what kind of decisions have been made or what kind of ideas were discussed today?
This goes a bit with this other thread started by The Jo: Of course the time is too early to discuss paper cuts before any release, but obviously the students are not aware what the real problems are with the code. How do you expect anybody to understand the inner workings of the code and to become integrated into the project if all they hear is: "Yeah, that is just superficial change you are addressing, we have problems going deeper and I'm working at it."

[1337]

Well, I guess we all see the problems ^^

But I see the main problem in the fact that this is a 'leisure time' project (except for the PPS students), meaning that the contributors actually like working for it.
So, ask somebody to do "not so much fun" stuff for free (the assistants get payed for three hours attendance). If you're very lucky, you'll get it. But I hope you can see the point.

Even now, I spend most of my orxonox time with cleaning up, fixing bugs and preparing work for other contributors. Where should I take time to share everything I do?

I mean, I would be very glad if I could just send an eMail to the dev mailinglist about breaking changes in the code (which I'm famous for...). But it doesn't help if you know that half of the people won't get/read the mail anyway. Then you simply type an extensive commit message (I really recommend reading those).


Something I would like to adress as well: the grand "masterplan". We have one, but it's scattered among the brains of the main devs. We should definitely do something about that. Wiki maybe? Because tickets are not suitable (too much structural changes).


And something about new contributors getting in touch with the game: I see only one way to make it possible for people to contribute without a two week 24/7 introduction. And that is to encapsulate separate subprojects and write a good documentation about the interface. Yes, I just said that, knowing that I'm not exactly the number one documentation writer...

[beni]

Hmm, I see the frustration with the developers list, but I honestly cannot follow commit messages at all (and never could) because they are too much out of context. I have to admit, that some commit messages are very good and informative, but when the work of a week is spread over 50 small commit messages I totally lost track of the important things.

I think the idea behind the developers list is not discussing the details of a project, but rather rough concepts for future development. However, we DO have a forum, so we could discuss those things in threads like this as well. I believe the forum deems the developer list useless, if it is used often. You can be sure I read every single post in this forum, so I'd be reading your message in every case .

I agree with the master plan. It is totally scattered and I think that you are right that we should use the wiki for that. The wiki is very static and many people just keep adding stuff without integrating it properly into the existing structure. It would be very cool if everybody would just immediately changes and updates every page he's reading with more information that comes to his mind. Maybe the wiki is not good enough?
Wikipedia for instance has a talk page for every wiki page where changes can be discussed. This would be great to jot down some notes that are not yet perfect. I have this problem with the story. I have some ideas that change often and need a lot of work before I could integrate them, but the wiki page just looks very official and I don't want the story to be something that cannot be changed.
So for the master plan I would wish for a comment section and more participation in the wiki. Just fixing a heading or a typo would help a lot.

[x3n]

tl; dr

[The Jo]

I wasn't part of the PPS for a long time now, but I do remember, that at the beginning every student presented his work to everybody once in a while (not sure if it was every lesson, but we did it very often).

I would be willing to make a short presentation of my work to the other PPS students (although I guess there won't be anything exciting), to make a start and to continue the old traditions.
But I'll only do this, if this proceed will be supported by the PPS assistants and if I won't be the only one to make a short presentation. (Besides I'm not eager to start this process personally, but I'm eager to have this process started.)

[x3n]

I wasn't part of the PPS for a long time now, but I do remember, that at the beginning every student presented his work to everybody once in a while (not sure if it was every lesson, but we did it very often).

I would be willing to make a short presentation of my work to the other PPS students (although I guess there won't be anything exciting), to make a start and to continue the old traditions.
But I'll only do this, if this proceed will be supported by the PPS assistants and if I won't be the only one to make a short presentation. (Besides I'm not eager to start this process personally, but I'm eager to have this process started.)

we used to do this in earlier semesters afair. in my opinion we should revive this tradition. 1-2 PPS days per semester where every students gives a ~1 min presentation about his work.

[greenman]

it could certainly help to get more team spirit. we just got to keep it short and firm to not distract the students too much from their work

[beni]

That was cool today. Let's do that more often. It is very interesting to hear from everybody about their progress with their projects and it was pretty clear that most students were not just listening, but also thinking about each others projects which is exactly what we wanted to achieve. Let's hope there will be some collaboration between the projects.

[greenman]

ack