Team Culture and Visibility
As a side track, I brought up topics like the team culture, attracting new contributors and make the past achievements and current progress more visible.
Throughout the years we were able to establish a strong team culture with shared values and a specific way to approach the day-to-day work. While you need to keep a team small in order to create such a culture, it is now the time to turn team members into mentors and evangelists.
The team was always open to new contributors and took their time to introduce them to our working mode. But since one-on-one tutoring doesn't scale that well, we need to figure out new ways for new contributors to "do the right thing" intuitively. One approach we'd like to try is coming up with a product mission statement (for each of the products, Neos and Flow) and create a introduction page along the lines of the <link https: developers.google.com web-toolkit makinggwtbetter>Making GWT Better page from Google.
With a new metrics-powered page neos.typo3.org/progress we'd like to visualize what happened recently, in terms of code, discussions and decisions. If you are familiar with Flow coding and like to play with metrics, we'd love to brief you on the ideas we have and help you creating some tools and plugins to make progress visible.
Another step towards making the behind-the-scenes work more tangible is the idea to post a short summary of all relevant discussions and decisions which have been taken during IRC discussions or online meetings. Watch our mailing list to see if we can make this happen …