Who is the community again?
I called into a conference call to get into the details of next week's OSP 2.4 requirements group meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The big players in OSP are going to be there...and us. We had just completed voting on what we thought were the big issues that really needed to be addressed in the next release. Goal Aware wasn't last, so that made my day...
The results of that vote live over here, in the Sakai wiki.
The point I was trying to make was that I had a hard time with that vote. I've spent the past year up to my nose in OSP and Sakai trying to make it work for us. As a result, I have learned a lot. While watching the Sakai-user and Sakai-dev lists I see a lot of people struggling to get their head around OSP. Its just not obvious how to use the tools. When you learn that you need a small army of developers to run the thing, it is so easy to get discouraged.
We jumped a big hurdle (and developed a decent tool set to boot!) while learning all this. For me, a set of sample forms won't help. We can make templates now. We understand and probably helped to shape our use cases. I saw that these were requirements to vote on for 2.4. Better documentation and examples are sorely needed. After this semester, I think we can contribute to that...but I don't need it.
On the one hand, we could vote for items to improve the Out of The Box experience, which would help to increase adoption and bring new developers and users into the mix, making the long term success of the project more likely. On the other, we could drill deep, voting for the features we would really like to see at our institution. Its a tough call.
Jay reminded us that by voting for the pieces that will make the software work and increase adoption at our institutions, we will meet the needs of the community at large. He said, "WE ARE THE COMMUNITY", by which I believe he meant to say that we are a pretty good cross section of the community. If we vote for it, it will scratch others' itch.
I feel better.