 |
Where did all the projects go?
Posted by sonyabarry on June 26, 2008 at 02:12 PM | Comments (19)
One of my great frustrations as a new user of java.net was that it's hard to tell at a glance which projects are currently under active development. We have many members who join java.net looking for active projects so they can join and work on a project. Many project owners would love to have the help.
In an effort to help those two groups connect as quickly as possible we've started reviewing projects in the general community to see how busy they are, and then we are archiving them or deleting them if they aren't currently active. Some communities take care of this on their own, and some don't. Our goal is to have some basic standards for activity and apply them consistently wherever it's needed.
So what defines an active project? I'm looking for signs of life in mailing lists (public or private), source code updates, the bug tracker, or additions to the documents and files section. Anything that has usable content, either a completed project or a project that was started and then abandoned, but has seen no activity in the past year is going to be archived.
So what does that mean? Really, we don't have a separate storage space for "archived" projects. So what we've done is created a top level community called archive (archive.dev.java.net) and have started notifying owners that the project will be moved to the new community because it's been inactive for so long. I'm also leaving notes on the front page of any project that has been, or is subject to being moved so that users surfing around java.net get a clear picture of that project's status immediately. Archived projects are still accessed the same way as any other project (i.e. projectname.dev.java.net) and maintain exactly whatever privacy and security settings their owners originally put in place. I'm giving the owners at least 30 days notice that the projects will be moved, but moving them sooner if I receive express permission from the owners to do so.
The idea is that older projects can still be found and accessed immediately by people who want to download their source code or begin development again, but that they won't be mixed in with the current projects. A happy side effect is that a couple of project owners seem to be taking this as a nudge to start working on their neglected projects as well.
I'm also going through and deleting a few projects. Candidates for deletion are projects that were created over a year ago but have no useful content. All owners are notified and have 30 days to get back to me before I delete anything, and I'm not making any value judgements about "useful" content. If there is anything at all in the repository or in the docs and files section of a project, I'm archiving it by default.
What do you think? We're trying to find ways to make java.net easier to use for everybody. I hope this is a step in the right direction.
Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
Good move.
And in 60 days, with no answer from owner, remove the project.
Posted by: claudio on June 26, 2008 at 04:06 PM
-
Sounds really good to me too!
Also rating more than just the top 10 projects would be really informative. (The top 10 are typically the same every month)
Posted by: cajo on June 26, 2008 at 04:30 PM
-
cajo, actually that's something else I'm working on. One of the other hats I wear involves gathering activity stats for all of the public projects on java.net. I am hoping to have a few new things open to project owners and members available in the next month or two. One of the big ones is a monthly top fifty list of projects that shows how much activity they have, what percentage of the total on java.net they contribute, and how many unique users contributed in that month. There will be more details coming when I've figured out where to put the thing. :)
Posted by: sonyabarry on June 26, 2008 at 04:43 PM
-
This is a good move. One thing I'd like to see is, at the top of the project page is a) does the project have any downloadable files and b) does the project have anything to check out under version control. Both of these might require some manual effort, esp. if the files are linked from another server or if the project has web content in version control but no actual code. Still, it would save time--I frequently run across projects that sound interesting and waste 10 minutes bouncing around before I find out they've neither released anything nor checked anything in. Good luck with the cleanup! Patrick
Posted by: pdoubleya on June 26, 2008 at 10:36 PM
-
Yep, so hard to find real collaborators :) .. but the idea of moving th obsolete projects to an archive are seems quite natural and useful
Posted by: felipegaucho on June 27, 2008 at 03:10 AM
-
just got the notification that beansbinding is a candidate for archiving, now let's see if it really still has Sun's support (assuming that Shannon's reading his mail) LOL - and SCNR to pass that on
Jeanette
Posted by: kleopatra on June 27, 2008 at 04:22 AM
-
Looks like its just some joker with a sick sense of humour - look at the bottom of that post https://beansbinding.dev.java.net/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=581 "No, this email's not real"..
Not that they don't have a point, beanbindings is probably cutting it close for real. What about finding new owners for some of the projects where their owners have left Sun..? beansbindings appframeframework and timingframework & transitions all need some TLC (or at least some apologies).
Posted by: osbald on June 27, 2008 at 06:13 AM
-
For the record, beansbinding wasn't notified, and isn't on the list. Because, 1) it's not in the general community,which is where I started and 2) a glance at the top level of the repository shows there was an update 8 weeks ago.
Also, I'm only emailing the owners of the project, not the mailing lists.
osbald, I've already come across a couple of Sun-employee owned projects that are being archived. It's not my call to decide if Sun's going to staff them up again, but I'm standing by the rule that if it's seen no action in the last year, it moves to the archive community.
Posted by: sonyabarry on June 27, 2008 at 06:49 AM
-
o...o - that's what I get from being too lazy to scroll ;-) Sorry for spreading nonsense!
Jeanette
Posted by: kleopatra on June 27, 2008 at 07:24 AM
-
What's considered the 'general' community? how do you tell if a project is included in this sweep or not? I don't see general under the community navigation under http://community.java.net/projects/. Just wondering about projects like swinglabs that has dependencies on several other projects that have easily been abandoned for 12 months+ (staff have left - so won't get the emails?). Far as I can tell they're all simply JavaDesktop community?
Are some projects special and have the links between projects been declared? i.e. do linked projects get archived if they're parent isn't or visa-versa.
Posted by: osbald on June 27, 2008 at 07:48 AM
-
osbald, now we're getting into infrastructure issues. :)
Each "community" is really just a project with subprojects, so just like you'd find beansbinding at beansbinding.dev.java.net, you'd also find the general community at general.dev.java.net, and you'll find anything that's been archived in the archive community at archive.dev.java.net.
If you look at the general community you'll see a list of all its current subprojects. Based on what I've done so far (about a third) I expect to reduce the size of that list by about half by mid August.
You can also determine which community a project is in by looking at the breadcrumbs in the upper left hand corner of the project home page. So again, using beansbinding as an example, it's a subproject of swinglabs, which is a subproject of javadesktop.
There are a few projects in the general community, for example games-demos, which I'm leaving intact because they are parent projects to a class of active projects. Also, any archived project is still accessed by the exact same set of URLs as the active project (the URL of a project is not aware of what community it is in or who it's parent is), so any links to or from an archive project will continue to work as they did when the project was active.
Finally, many of the bigger communities have their own governance and handle pruning (or not) of projects on their own. We (in this case, Marla Parker, the java.net community manager, and myself) are not imposing our will on any projects belonging to any community with active governance in place. If a community has been neglected, we probably will. Marla had me start with general, because she owns general. It may be the case that the community leads at javadesktop ask me to do this for them as well, but if that happens I would follow whatever standards they put in place, including maintaining project hierarchy in the archive if that's important to them.
Posted by: sonyabarry on June 27, 2008 at 08:19 AM
-
Maybe the reason there is low activity with a project is because no one can find things. Maybe instead of removing projects (albeit there are some that are empty or have no source nor members and then it makes since) the infrastructure of java.net needs to change.
What if a few projects were showcased each week on the front page of Java.net in each of the categories, so that everyone could see what each was about. Maybe allow keyword tagging by others and a page to browse by tags would help folks find interesting stuff.
Just because a project doesn't have activity doesn't mean it doesn't have value. It could be that the community isn't seeing the value just yet, and in a year or two the world will catch up with these projects needs. Case in point, everyone use to be high on XML as a transfer protocol, now a shift has happened to where a growing number believe JSON, or other protocols may be better. Does that mean the person that was on the bleeding edge 2 years ago with a JSON library project should be removed just as the community is realizing and learning about the benefits of JSON.
Just some thoughts.
-Shawn
Posted by: sfitzjava on June 27, 2008 at 08:54 AM
-
Shawn, I think you're right about people not being able to find things, and the primary reason is that we're completely clogged with projects that no one has touched in years. The truth is, although I've set the cut off at a year ago, most of the projects that I'm archiving or deleting have seen no movement in four or five years. We have hundreds, maybe over a thousand projects that have been untouched since 2004.
As far as highlights on the front page go, our editor Chris (invalidname) has been begging for project owners and community leads to send him things to highlight for years. And they don't. When he sees something good, he highlights it. If you've got suggestions, he'd love to hear them.
Keyword tagging is something that we would love to do in the future, but current budgets don't include it and to have it integrated in java.net would involve massive overhauls by CollabNet. We are looking at things like del.icio.us to leverage that might give us some tagging utility. If you've got suggestions on that front, we'd love to hear them too.
Finally, I absolutely agree that inactive projects have value. That's why we're not putting them on a shelf to gather dust. As I said earlier, anything with code in a repository, useful discussions in a mailing list, or specs in the docs and files section is being kept and is will be just as accessible tomorrow as it was yesterday. The only major difference is that until somebody realizes their greatness, they will live in the archive community. Google searches will still find them. Links to them will continue to work. If a project is brought back to life, it is literally a 30 second task to move it back to its original community. You just need to let me or Marla know.
Posted by: sonyabarry on June 27, 2008 at 09:19 AM
-
Hmm .. hearing your time-frame (roughly a quarter of a year) that appears to be much effort for little effect. How about doing it the other way round: everthing goes into a community cut-date-now (nothing lost there, because all the links are still working, search as well), active projects (that is those with code commits, content production, visits .. whatever) come up automatically back into front. Plus owners can move (or appy for moving) them back to front. No sweeping work effort needed on your part, and the valuable will find their way back soon by themselves.
Jeanette
Posted by: kleopatra on June 27, 2008 at 12:01 PM
-
The "general" community is sometimes referred to as the un-community. It is just a general catch-all group of projects that either do not want to be in a defined Community or that do not really fit in any of the ones that exist today. The set of Communities on java.net changes over time.
Jeanette's suggestion of reversing the process so that active projects bubble to the top is exactly what we would love to do. The catch is the keyword "automatically." We do not have the infrastructure and we wont have it as soon as we'd like, so it makes sense to take the time for some housecleaning.
Besides Activity Metrics, which measure participation in terms of writes to a project, we also hope to make some web stats, reads and download counts, available at least to project owners and for some top projects, more than the current ten, as well. We have those stats available inside Sun, and the work to automate making them available is a small enough job that we can tackle it sooner than later, within the constraints of the current infrastructure.
Posted by: marla_parker on June 27, 2008 at 12:17 PM
-
Sonya, sounds to me like you're taking some excellent steps to make java.net more useful. I have another pain point which is the amount of time it takes to generate an alpha sorted list of projects: something like 3-5 minutes. Really slow. Any improvement in this function would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Posted by: steven_reynolds on June 27, 2008 at 02:45 PM
-
I am a new/older user of java.net, & I still feel like a new member to this very moment. I have "Joined a Project" that I am "Stil PENDING" and have been the past month. I have had a nightmare of a time searching,joining(trying) Wiki, blogs, forum discussions etc. I think it would be an excellent idea to trim, review,archive some of the irrelevant,lost, not working due to lack of input or what ever it is I don't know. I have joined mailing lists, tracked, even been told to "Start a Project" ALL I WANT TO DO IS BE AVERY WILLING MEMBER AND PARTICIPANT OF THE ROBOTICS PROJECT. With a particular interest in "OPENJAUS. I feel it is a very good idea to refresh, upate, put forward some new, fresh workable, relevant projects. Perhaps a Review of by the java.net Community, as to what is REALLY relevant and that people/owners/members are prepared to be involved in, could be a thought?? I don't know what is really wrong here, except that I have had a horrifying time navigating, joining, getting connected etc. I would BE VERY HAPPY TO UPTAKE THE ROBOTICS PROJECT, f that is absolutely necessary, but I would just like to see on my "Start Page" that I am Involved in a Project at some time.!!! I believe there may be a few too many "Projects" that appear to be up & running, but for some reason when one looks at discussions,announcements, CVS's etc. you only find that nothing has been input to them or updated for more than 1-3 years. It's a bit of a worry. I happened to stumble upon this page, thinking I was the only one "Wondering Where Did All the Projects Go?" I do hope we all succeed in actually becoming an organised, working community here on java.net. If I could have someone inform me that I am not just "Pending" on a Project please?? That would help me, and I'm seeing I'm not the only person with troubles. So Thankyou for noticing java.net site. & problems it is having.
Posted by: commanderjared3068 on June 28, 2008 at 02:22 AM
-
+1 on the clean up. Since you're doing some work on the repositories... what about making available to us the download statistics for our stuff? :-) The most frustrating thing about java.net is that I don't know how many people have downloaded my projects.
PS Kleopatra, I was fooled by the beansbinding fake mail as well :-)
Posted by: fabriziogiudici on June 28, 2008 at 08:09 AM
-
Hi, CommanderJared (regarding OJaus and monitor membership requests)
Hi - I'm not the project leader, but am one of the robotics community leads so I just approved four people to OJaus. Not sure why you all have been waiting so long, but did see a notice on the project home page: "I'm thrilled to announce that this project is being absorbed by the OpenJAUS Project (http://openjaus.com)!" -- so maybe the leaders are putting their attention on that site. I know the leaders of that project are very busy with robotics day jobs. A lot (not all) of us on java.net are volunteers and there seems never enough time for everything I would like to do...
One thing that makes it harder than I would like for project leaders to monitor member requests is that there's no simple "you have member requests to handle" link when leaders log in. We have to search through the lists of each project to see if anything is pending. This takes a lot of navigating. And there is no way to send a message to each applicant as part of the accept/deny/accept differently process of handling member requests.
Project leaders do get emails about new requests, but community leaders don't. And it's easy for emails to get lost or ignored. A tickler with shortcuts on project leader's login pages seems like an obvious solution. Google and Yahoo groups provide that.
If this process were more streamlined it would help us all manage member requests better.
best regards
Bruce
Posted by: bboyes on June 30, 2008 at 09:57 AM
|
java.net RSS Feeds
