Milestones
I was asking on irc (#debian-jr on irc.openprojects.net) last night about
what would make the most impact on our web site. The most important idea
that came up is the need for a roadmap, or milestones. Someone said "like
the Mozilla milestones[1] except without the dates". The idea is to have
the milestones made up of measurable tasks that address certain of our
goals. There was consensus last night that attaching specific dates to
our timeline is not a great idea. Deadline pressure rarely accomplishes
what it intends to accomplish. Doubly so with volunteer projects like
ours. The potential for deadline slippage is enormous, and it will only
hurt morale. So we'll stick to measuring "product" in ways other than
"elapsed time", as it is such an arbitrary measure as to be worthless.
[1] See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milestones/index.html
So let's give sketch this out. I think I know where I want to see the
project go at least in the short-term, and I would like some help filling
out and organizing the roadmap. I have organized these in no particular
order with three parts, "goal" (from our web page[2]), "task", and
"metrics". These are not sufficient in and of themselves for a roadmap
because we will have to decide two more things, "sequence" and
"quantification of metrics", or as someone eloquently put it last night,
"how many foos do we need before we have a bar" :) I have only started to
flesh out tasks and metrics under one of the goals.
[2] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr
- Goal: marketing & pr
- Task: choose a logo
- Metric: we have chosen a logo (duh :)
- Task: establish external awareness of project
- Metric: number of matches on google.com/linux?q=debian-jr (count
only dissimilar matches)
- Metric: number of times we are published by non-Debian sources
- Task: establish internal awareness of project
- Metric: number of inquiries by non-members about the project
- Metric: number of people on mailing list
- Task: attract volunteers for project
- Metric: number of members actively making posts to the mailing list
- Metric: number of members with one or more contributed packages or
contribution of some other sort (logo, web page, review of
a package, etc.)
[ Actually, maybe we have missed a goal for this task that wasn't
stated on our goals page, and that is "growth of the project". Or
maybe that is just a subgoal of "marketing & pr"? I don't have a
good feel for whether it needs a separately listed goal. ]
For now, let's not go any further than listing these three things: goals,
tasks and metrics. We can later decide what specific actions are needed
to accomplish these tasks (and indeed, the actions themselves need not
really be listed on the roadmap, which is an overview document and doesn't
really get that specific). We can also decide later what order these
things need to be done in, once we understand some of the dependencies in
sequence between tasks. And at the end of the process we can group
together a handful of things to do for each milestone and list specific
quantifications of our chosen metrics which signal the completion of the
task. Some of these tasks will undoubtedly need to be split across
multiple milestones. We'll need to gauge the size of each thing somehow
and try to decide how much of each task should be complete for each
milestone.
Anyway, if there are some goals that don't fit into any of the goals on
the web page, or if anyone else can contribute a bit more to this
beginning of a list, please speak up. I'd like to have something roughed
out and linked from the web page at the end of this discussion period.
I'm looking for breadth not depth at this point. So brainstorm away!
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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