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[msc at freeswitch.org]

Dear FreeSWITCH Community:

As you know, FreeSWITCH has been growing leaps and bounds and it's going to keep growing as the word spreads. The core development team of Anthony, Mike, and Brian are very appreciative of the community's help and involvement in the project. Simply put: the community is awesome!

Some have asked how they can help. Most of us are not software developers, but that doesn't mean we can't help to grow the FreeSWITCH ecosystem. To this end I've started a "janitor projects" wiki page:

http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Janitor_Projects

We say "janitor" projects because they are things that help keep the project clean and organized, just like the janitor cleans an office, takes out the trash, replaces the toilet paper, etc. These are valuable services that we sometimes take for granted. However, I think we can all appreciate that the FreeSWITCH project would be better served if the developers could focus on writing code, fixing bugs, etc. and not on the easier, not-quite-as-important janitorial tasks. To that end we are inviting all who wish to volunteer to please visit the above wiki page and check out some of the projects listed so far. Email me off list if you'd like to volunteer to help. I'm maintaining a list of "janitors" and what they are helping with. If you have ideas for other janitor projects then by all means email them to me and we'll discuss them.

Thanks again for being such a great community!

-Michael S Collins
IRC: mercutioviz

See you at ClueCon 2009!  http://www.cluecon.com

[mszlazak at aol.com]

First off. I would not call it a "janitors project" since that may offend some. A second problem is your notion that documentation is "not-quite-as-important" a task as writing code. I'm think many would say you have that backwards. There is nothing more effective in evolving FreeSwitch than good documentation which helps further development and is an important part of "customer service." Good customer service is then a part of "sales and marketing." Much more often than not, It's sales and marketing that is more important to making something a "real product" than engineering. "Build it and they will come" almost never works.

Anyway, I think you need a new name for this project.





-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Collins <msc@freeswitch.org>
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org <freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org>; freeswitch-dev@lists.freeswitch.org
Sent: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 5:10 pm
Subject: [Freeswitch-users] Call For Help: Janitor Projects

Dear FreeSWITCH Community:

As you know, FreeSWITCH has been growing leaps and bounds and it's going to keep growing as the word spreads. The core development team of Anthony, Mike, and Brian are very appreciative of the community's help and involvement in the project. Simply put: the community is awesome!

Some have asked how they can help. Most of us are not software developers, but that doesn't mean we can't help to grow the FreeSWITCH ecosystem. To this end I've started a "janitor projects" wiki page:

http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Janitor_Projects

We say "janitor" projects because they are things that help keep the project clean and organized, just like the janitor cleans an office, takes out the trash, replaces the toilet paper, etc. These are valuable services that we sometimes take for granted. However, I think we can all appreciate that the FreeSWITCH project would be better served if the developers could focus on writing code, fixing bugs, etc. and not on the easier, not-quite-as-important janitorial tasks. To that end we are inviting all who wish to volunteer to please visit the above wiki page and check out some of the projects listed so far. Email me off list if you'd like to volunteer to help. I'm maintaining a list of "janitors" and what they are helping with. If you have ideas for other janitor projects then by all means email them to me and we'll discuss them.

Thanks again for being such a great community!

-Michael S Collins
IRC: mercutioviz

See you at ClueCon 2009! http://www.cluecon.com

[ribs at acm.org]

You are then volunteering for something?

2009/3/31 <mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com)>

[mszlazak at aol.com]

I just did, and it was suggestion.





-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Edelstein <ribs@acm.org>
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Sent: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 12:00 am
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] Call For Help: Janitor Projects

You are then volunteering for something?

2009/3/31 <mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com)>

[dujinfang at gmail.com]

Agree, I think the author better to document the code first.


For a simple example: if you add a new param or channel variable, at least should add an item to the wiki, so others knows there is a new variable and try that add add detailed explanation or experience further.

On Apr 1, 2009, at 2:21 PM, mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com) wrote:

[raul at etellicom.com]

Pardon my honesty, but I think you are the one who is getting this
backwards.

Firstly, I fail to see why a call for help with organizing and cleaning
up the project documentation would offend someone by simply having
"janitor" as the name. Have you ever heard the term "gatekeeper"
before ? Would it offend you ? Think again.

Secondly, FreeSWITCH is an open-source project, so forget the 'marketing
& sales' crap in the context of documentation. The success of the
project, which is growing incredibly fast, is built upon the
collaboration of the community as a whole, and it's common sense that
sharing the project tasks is a major necessary step to keep it going,
just like a janitor is of primordial importance to keep an office
building organized and clean.

Last but not the least, I agree entirely with the fact that the core
developers should be doing what they do it best, and that is, of course,
development. I see this call for help request as an effective way of
keeping them developing new features and improving the current
functionality of FreeSWITCH while sharing the burden of documentation
and organization. That's fair and sounds very logical to me. If you join
the FreeSWITCH IRC channel and hang in there for a bit you will
understand what I mean, most of the time these guys are busy responding
to user questions or analyzing use cases that could be easily solved by
checking a more organized documentation, and this is what Michael's
request is all about.

Regards,

Raul

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 02:21 -0400, mszlazak@aol.com wrote:

[brian at freeswitch.org]

What do you recommend calling it then? I wouldn't be offended by it ... and I can't think of any reason it would offend someone because it describes the task at hand. As far as documentation vs code... without the code there would be ZERO need for any documentation. The code is the hardest part to make sure it functions bug free. Developers are great at writing code but not the best at writing documentation, me included. It's the perfect place for anyone that wants to help out! I welcome anyone and everyone to the project in hopes that community members will help out!

We have various IRC channels... #freeswitch, #freeswitch-dev, #freeswitch-docs and #freeswitch-social so join irc.freenode.net and get involved because you never know how it might change your life for the better!


/b
Positive anything is better than negative thinking.

On Apr 1, 2009, at 1:21 AM, mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com) wrote:

[jason at jasonjgw.net]

seven <dujinfang@gmail.com> wrote:

[dujinfang at gmail.com]

I know that. And I'd like to read code. Developers written great code
and also plenty of comments(which is documentation) in code. However,
there are sth. don't need to comment in code but should be available
on wiki. E.g. I followed the svn commit log, and found
sip_auth_username and sip_auth_password added, so I documented to the
wiki.

On Apr 1, 2009, at 6:00 PM, Jason White wrote:

[anthony.minessale at g...]

have a look.
http://www.google.com/search?q=janitor+project
The phrase has already been coined.

If you look closely we have 2 different perspectives in this thread.

mszlazak is seeking more of the higher level user documentation, the holy grail magic documentation that
is like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy or harry potter's marauder's map can tune into what you need to know
or what you don't understand and magically adjusts.  This is normal, we have a lot of users like that.  The majority of users
will treat us like they are buying the software from us and impose their expectations on us.  It's helpful to us, it lets us
see things from their perspective.

Seven is looking it at more from a developer's perspective, he's actually willing to take the time to add things
to the wiki and he wants to understand how the code works.  This is a good thing too, there are far less people of this type
in our community but they are crucial. 

Core developers document by explaining what they are doing to people like Seven or by putting a reminder in the commit notes which are later translated into the CHANGELOG for the releases.  Michael, the author of this thread has added countless pages of documentation to the wiki this way.  It's easy to say the author should document everything.  There is close to 300,000 lines of
code in just the src directory in the FreeSWITCH tree (that is all code we wrote not counting any of the depends libs or any other form of pre-existing code).  I personally wrote the majority of that code so, I really appricate it when the communiuty gives me a few minutes to take a break while they document it.  The best people to document the high level fuctionality  is not the author btw.  It's the first few people who use it.  Most likely they are developing a product from it and they intend to profit from it in one way or another and its a fair tradeoff to have the section of functionality explained to them in exchange from wikifying it from their perspective.  The perspective of the author will be dry and mechinacal where that first-time-user version of the documentation will make much more sense to future readers. 

When it comes to the low level documentation, the C functions, we also need someone to help us with that if they feel there is not enough.  We write code, we know how it works.  If other people cannot figure out how it works, they will ask us and in the end it will be doucmented.  About 5% or less of people in the community even have to look in the code for the core.  The whole point of the FreeSWITCH design is to push everything up to scripts, remote connections and dialplan logic to let people concentrate on good ideas instead of the evil logic necessary to properly engineer a telephony engine.  So I recommend anybody interested starts out making sure there is ample documentation for the embedded and external API for lua, js, perl, python, ESL etc.  Then anybody who really likes C code can start with the module API layer and then dig deeper into the core code and learn how it works and if the documentation is not enough, add some, we appriciate any help we can get.

 







2009/4/1 <mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com)>

[intralanman at freeswi...]

seven wrote:

[msc at freeswitch.org]

On Apr 1, 2009, at 6:59 AM, Raymond Chandler
<intralanman@freeswitch.org> wrote:

[jmesquita at gmail.com]

I am sorry, but I really have to comment this one. Why the fuck do we
need to have sooo much politics on an open source project? Janitor,
non-janitor, developer, non-developer, girl or boy, we are all trying
to get this thing better, aren't we? So leave your fucking ego out of
the question and get your ass doing something that will actually get
this project somewhere like we all instead of trying to get yourself
called something. You want the president title? Get it and start
working.

Tony is the master dude in this place because, like he said, he wrote
most of the 300,000 line of code. That simple. The title "core
developers team" (sounds great, doesn't it?) are because .... they do
CORE! Wanna be called core developer, DO CORE!

Anyway, my suggestion is, want something done? DO IT. Don't know how?
Study! Don't want to know how ... buy Avaya or whatever. They will
charge for your laziness.

Sorry for the bad language.

Mesquita

On Apr 1, 2009, at 10:59 AM, Raymond Chandler wrote:

[mszlazak at aol.com]

Pardon me, but you speak only for yourself. I think Janitor is not an appropriate word.

Second, 'marketing and sales' does not only mean making money. It also means 'selling' someone on the idea of trying something and effectively spreading the word.



Third, the original developers can spend most of their time developing because they're the creators so they know very well what's going on with the code and don't need good documentation. Others need good documentation to effectively work with FS or do development. Currently the documentation is scattered, assumes to much and is outdated/incorrected. Also, there is a problem with not getting the "creators" involved with documentation since someone doing the documentation will have to ask them what's what. The "creators" never will be totally out of the loop nor should they be. This doesn't apply only here in this context but other similar ones as well. Keeping "creators" from inteact with "customers" is one big reason so many start-ups fail.


-----Original Message-----
From: Raul Fragoso <raul@etellicom.com>
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Sent: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 1:29 am
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] Call For Help: Janitor Projects

[brian at freeswitch.org]

Are you referring to PocketSphinx here?

/b

On Apr 1, 2009, at 12:24 PM, mszlazak@aol.com (mszlazak@aol.com) wrote: