osdf-devteam team mailing list archive

[Andrew Ettinger <sillydeveloper@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey gang,

I'm a political junkie with a coding problem! If you are receiving this, you might have the same problems.

If you haven't already, and you still want to help, please get on LaunchPad so we can share code and tasks. We do have a mailing list there, which is available through the osdf-devteam group on LaunchPad; be sure to subscribe to it once you get in the group! 

"Hey, wait, what is all this stuff?" If you are new to version control, unsure how to use Bazaar, or are confused by LaunchPad, we have an introduction to working with Bazaar and LaunchPad for developers to help you get up and running. There's even instructions for getting up and running on Windows! (I'm a *nix =)

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for the community to contribute, so please let me know if you are having problems or don't know how you can help. If you need help identifying low hanging fruit that meets your skill set, let me know! 

See something that needs to be done? Add a blueprint or a bug report for it. See a blueprint or a bug you want to work on? Assign it to yourself and get started! Have a question or idea? Ask the group for feedback. 

I'm usually hanging out on the #osdf channel on freenode too (as idiotic_idioms), if I can help.


The Strategery So Far
Making things up as I've gone along, here's been my general plan:

1. Get initial barebones website up (done!)
2. Get WordPress up (deployed, but can probably be improved)
3. Further improve web capability (needs help!) 
4. Make Drupal theme (needs help!) 
5. Work on other, ongoing, OSDF tools

While we work on getting donations, volunteer management tools, and drupal up, we should discuss proposals for ongoing OSDF projects that can help put democracy in action.

Possible ongoing projects off the top of my head:  Open Data Initiative tools; zeto28's CAPP proposal; tools and applications that might make open source governance possible; ways to crunch open data; or working with Open Source for America. 

Our priority one goals, though, are to put the content in the hands of the content producers (drupalization) and to be able to receive donations to support our servers. But creating a drupal theme and payment processing is pretty easy... right? =)


More details on current series' milestones
I've been naming our releases alphabetically because, well, it's easy. Our initial release, angel, is now out on the new OSDF website. It was basically 'get the website up'.

Betty was initialization of the WordPress theme, which can probably use some more work and a WordPress guru to help do some of the administration tasks to get that install humming.

Cate should upgrade our ability to register volunteers and (hopefully) allow us to take donations. It should probably be coordinated with our next release, which is...

Donald, which is going to be our future with a drupal instance so we don't have to be quite so involved in making updates to the website (we can let the content people do that!) and we can start working on other things.

After that... well... we need to figure that out! There's a lot of exciting technical things that we can do! 


The wp Series
If you know what you are doing with WordPress, you can probably help clean that up and improve it -- it's pretty minimal at the moment. 

Want to work on this? Get this code:
bzr branch lp:osdf/wp


The Web Series (Cate)
There's still a lot of blueprints in this release that need to be talked about. If you have an interest in helping out with the website, check out the blueprints for the Cate release and let's start talking about options to get those blueprints done.

FYI: I've automated the meeting log updates. All you have to do is add the meeting logs into the public/meeting_notes folder and they will automatically appear on the meetings page, no additional coding necessary. So when Eddie asks us to post'em, just add them into that folder. =)

Want to work on this? Get this code: 
bzr branch lp:osdf/web


The Drupal Series (Donald)
I've uploaded a barebones drupal theme (I think it's the default one) for us to start with.

If someone has experience with drupal themes, feel free to add blueprints or notes in Donald, and start making changes to that theme. Many of the blueprints in Cate will need to be ported or coordinated with Donald. 

Also: We'll have a 'backdoor' drupal instance shortly to play with so we can set it up the way we want. If you are a drupal admin genius, please chime in!

Want to work on this? Get this code:
bzr branch lp:osdf/drupal


By the way, I'm just a guy who is excited to be working on this. I'm open to discussion and feedback.

And again, I'm on freenode's #osdf channel most of the time, hit me up if you have questions, ideas, concerns or just want to talk shop. 


Cheers,

Andrew
	aka sillydeveloper / idiotic_idioms

P.S. Sorry for any dupes of this message, I wanted to make sure that people not yet on the mailing list had a chance to join and make sure we're on the same page! =)