fonosfera

Hello all,

As you probably know, we are little by little trying to build the fonosfera, a development community for the fon-ng firmware, meaning the new firmware generation for our recently launched fonera 2.0.
So, how to build this community? We want to do it progressively, the way to grow is by not closing any doors: we will try to learn every day from our memebers feedback. We have started rolling with this blog, a mailing list and an IRC channel. The IRC channel is surprisingly the most active place, there’re about 20 people all the time, giving ideas, helping each other, showing what they did etc. It’s already become a nice meeting place mostly for developers at this point but also very adviseable for users.

The next step is to install the real development framework. We think svn and trac, although probably not the best applications, meet a perfect balance: they are well known for most developers nowadays and are efficient enough.

The plan is that anyone will be able to open a ticket (no matter it’s a bug, a feature request or other) in trac. Meaning trac will be open, as usual in this kind of project, to all the public. On the other hand, svn will be, for the quality’s and the tidiness’ sake, restricted for writing although also open for reading. This is: anyone will be able to access any of the svn repositories for reading, but only selected users will have the write access granted.

Now, who will get write access? Again, we’re not reinventing the wheel, there are many other open source projects and we will follow a well known model: meritocracy. There will certainly be a FON official branch and the communities that have already proven good expertise and activity on modifying and improving FON’s firmware (such as francofon, freewlan and others) will have their own branch as well, but only a few members of them will have write access to it (or maybe all, this is very likely to be decided by the memebers of the group). Additionally, individuals that prove persistency, dilligency, interest and seriousness on helping the fonosfera and the firmware improve (by writing documentation, applications etc) will be elligible to get writing access to all or certain parts of the svn.

Well, this is the basic structure for now… as things keep moving on, we will add a space for end users, where the work that comes out of the development teams will be made available for them so they can install and customize their foneras

Hope you like the project. Please, feel free to comment, suggest and criticize!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.