group productivity software thoughts
I appologize if this is an old idea. I admit I don't read the lists much, and I
haven't checked to see if this has already been discussed.
I've observed that there is a LOT of group productivity software becoming
available. Specifically, the combination of the Imp (http://horde.org/imp),
ezmlm (http://pobox.com/~djb/ezmlm.html), mhonarc, and various project specific
tools such as CVS could be a very powerful combination if there were a simple
way to say, "create a new project and ask me for parameters". Most of these
tools are pretty easy to setup, if a little tedious.
My thought is that there is a need here (in the free software/open source
world) for a "project management package". I'm not a registered (or
unregistered) Debian developer (yet...), and I am not actually offering to put
this all together right now. I'm actually just throwing my thought into the
pool in the hope that it will either inspire someone to start the project, or
someone will point me at an ongoing project of this sort.
If neither of these happens, I may just have to become a Debian developer after
all.
To fill in a little of what I've outlined above, I "envision" (cough cough) the
project with provisions for member tracking, either as part of the Horde
packages, or as part of the whole package. This tracking would mostly just be a
place to look up home pages, contact information, and task associations. With
one packaging managing the concepts of projects and groups, and then spawning
mailing lists, CVS hierarchies, and web pages corresponding to each of these,
much of the tedium of managing an open-source project could be handled
automatically.
Imagine, you create a "Tux and the GNU" game project, with sub-projects of 3D
engine, art, story, and 15 members divided four ways, and the project-
management package creates web pages for all the members, all the groups, all
the projects, supplies CVS info, creates mailing lists for the four projects
and the meta project, links for the mhonarc pages, and sets up a bug tracking
system. WOW! :)
I'll post again if I actually get a hankering to start working on it for real.
--
Robert de Forest robert@tapestry.net "Time flies like an arrow.
Network Administrator (831) 460-4355 Fruit flies like a banana."
Tapestry.net http://got.net/~crag/
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