[wp-hackers] Future of wp-hackers

[Martin Sturm]

2007/9/26, Austin Matzko <if.website at gmail.com>:
> I realized a while ago that many of the most important discussions
> about the future of WP were happening elsewhere, because fairly
> important changes would show up in trac without any prior wp-hackers
> discussion (with the major exception of the new terms taxonomy).  I
> could be wrong, but I don't believe there was any hackers discussion
> about jQuery, PHPMailer, and canonical url redirection, for example,
> prior to their appearing in trac.  And a few weeks ago, I learned from
> an aside somewhere on trac that Happy Cog is redesigning the admin.
> That seems like something that should have made an appearance on this
> list.
>
> So the list is what we make of it.  Take the important stuff away, and
> you leave a vacuum to be filled with all the other junk.
>
> [1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists

I agree with above comments. It seems that most of the decisions
regarding Wordpress future are made by the guys from Automattic. If
people cannot involve in discussions on important decisions in the
Wordpress codebase, I think eventually Wordpress will become less
relevant. There are open source projects that suffer from the same
problem, usually controlled by a single company. They try very hard to
create a community, but the community has the feeling to not be taken
seriously because decisions are made by a few people and announced to
the community without the possibility to comment. A good example is
the Fedora project. In the beginning Red Hat had a hard time to build
a community, because they didn't involve the community in the
decisions they made.

I think it is important to involve the community (in this case
developers) in decisions made with regard to the future of Wordpress.
If you restrict the access to the hackers list, I think the step to
get involved in the development of Wordpress will become to hard for
new developers. Maybe now that is not a real problem (because there
are enough persons developing on Wordpress) but I think you will have
to attract new people to keep a project like this healthy. Maybe one
person can create summaries of discussions which makes it easier to
keep up to date for hackers that don't want to spend a lot of time
discussing. There are plenty of other project that suffer from this
problem and found a good solution without banning people who don't
contribute very much code wise, but have a useful opinion on topics.

--
Martin