Re: Giving 1.10 alpha more exposure to gather feedback

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 5:21 PM, Jacek Materna <jacek_at_assembla.com> wrote:
> I mentioned earlier on past thread, and still stand by the statement
> that setting up a collaborative space beyond email is key to
> attracting, enabling and growing an active beta testing user base who
> is committed to genuinely testing, breaking and improving new
> features. Access to code, commenting, tickets to track improvements
> with real-time collaboration are super table-stakes. It may be too
> late for this alpha3 but something for the future to consider.
>
> I am actively running content marketing to rally excitement behind
> current and future release like alpha3 but more across the spectrum
> would increase visibility and 'fill the funnel' for new engaged
> beta-users wanting to push the alpha's over the line. Super key.
>
> -jacek

Hi Jacek,

Thanks for bringing this up again.

First, a note, after some IRC-discussion: we'll probably bring out
another 1.10 alpha or beta soon. The main reason is that 1.10-alpha3
is still vulnerable to CVE-2017-9800 (which was fixed in 1.8.19 and
1.9.7, but not yet in the 1.10 stream). A couple of other fixes might
be included. We're considering naming it "beta" now.

I agree a more integrated collaboration environment would a big plus.
But ... how do we get there? Without losing our independence as an ASF
project ...

Can we get there with ASF infrastructure? I doubt it. I've been
looking around a bit. We have:
- JIRA
- ViewVC
- Website (with FAQ)
- MoinMoin wiki (pretty old-school layout)
- Mailinglists (and archives)
- Some projects use Nabble for a forum fronting their mailinglists
(but they are sometimes plagued with spam)
- Some projects use ReviewBoard: https://reviews.apache.org/r/
- IRC (some projects also have channels on HipChat I think)

It'll be hard to use these tools and give an integrated, 21st century
experience.

More integrated environments would be GitHub, or the hosting of
Assembla and perhaps others, ... But those wouldn't be as
vendor-independent obviously. And we'd have to make some clear choice
as a project so we can point people that way, and so we have enough
presence of committers (i.e. we'd have to bless it as "the preferred /
official place" for our community). I'm not sure whether that's even a
possibility for our ASF-based community ...

Thoughts? Maybe some other devs can chime in?

-- 
Johan