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To everyone who contributed to first rollout, thank you! It was an amazing effort, and we couldn't have done it without you.

I've set down some notes and status, with an overview of where I see the project heading in the next few weeks. As always, we can stop and discuss if the community feels we should be moving in a different direction.

Thus begins the status:

Some have noticed that we don't have a structure or plan for development. This was *on purpose* for the duration of first release. I wanted to stay out of the developers' way and avoid anything that wasn't directly related to the rollout.

We were wildly successful, and can now proceed at a more leisurely pace. I have always intended to do development the right way - a strong foundation of tools, with people to oversee and coordinate the effort between people and other groups.

We have some overlords in place, but finding them is exceedingly difficult since I only know people from E-mail and for less than a week. For the near term, I'm the overlord of development, and I'm looking for someone to fill that spot. (And sys and style)

For this upcoming week I've told sys to take a break. Do minor bug fixes
at a leisurely pace if they feel bored, but I want people who are relaxed and refreshed. I don't want to lose people, and this has already happened.

The people who made the rollout happen are in the sys group. It's tiny (about a dozen people) and is concerned with system and server issues: bandwidth tiers, Varnish, Sphinx, linode accounts, registrars, load balancers, and so forth.

There's a much bigger group "dev" which is all the people who want to help develop code. There's some overlap, and of course everyone in sys has been doing dev for the past week. Anyone in sys is welcome to do dev work at any time, someone in dev who wants to do sys work has to be vetted.

A third group is "content": story editors, graphics, the wiki, forums, IRC and related. I'm hoping we'll have a more rich and varied landscape of content than just the news feed; for example, Landon (the overlord of IRC) wants to try weekly IRC chats with notable people, and Cactus (of the wiki) suggested the wiki could have entries for interesting discussions which are largely settled, but which keep cropping up.

A fourth group is "style": how the site is presented. CSS, layout, usability, ergonomics, advice on functionality.

The fifth group, "business", has not officially started (I have a total of three, count them thee, volunteers). This will be business-related topics such as marketing, legal, finance, [business] governance, and so on.

So for the near term, for a week or so, the editors are serving us delicious and interesting stories, while our users are getting comfortable with the system.

There's been some concern about decisions made during first rollout. I
promised that we would operate by community consensus, and I have to be looking at the big picture anyway. We can't afford to alienate anyone,
especially in these first stages.

In light of this:

1) We will use Git/GitHub for source control, since this seems to be consensus.

2) NCommander has proposed a heirarchy of development servers (three, in
addition to of the production server IIRC) for development, testing and
experimentation. We'll go with this because it's a good system that works for other projects (ie - the structure has been vetted) and it covers or surpasses suggestions from the community.

3) We will revisit the bug tracking system. Dev thinks it may be appropriate to have different systems with different intent (different systems, not different projects within one system). Dev should sort this out in the next 2 weeks or so, I'll make an executive choice if there is no general agreement. Start discussing!

4) The next dev effort will be version 2.0 of the newsfeed. Whether this is a rewrite or fixup will be based on community input. I've looked at
the perl code and NCommander's assessment that "it's not too bad" is entirely accurate for large swaths. I'm naming the effort v2.0.

As usual, if you have concerns feel free to E-mail and we'll talk.

R. Barrabas

Crew managed to trade Spam for rum before we left port;

First mate was shanked for whistling showtunes on deck.

Dear god, both day two and day three have been devoured by sharks.

Need more grog.