Earlier today I started this thread in the Spark google group:

dragon

There was a session at altnetseattle I kicked off “How to organize an OSS project for participation and longevity”

It was a thinly veiled attempt to solicit assistance, like the earlier thread, and recent tweet about “Re: Spark Project growth & futures. Know talented community developers you believe should be interested?”

The take-away from the session was very productive but didn’t provide simple answers. It provided obvious answers that require non-trivial effort, which passes the sanity check of the engineer in me.

Grow the base of read-only adoption, encourage promotion to the second tier of casual contributor, and it’s from that tier the active managing participants emerge. So it appears if I don’t want to be singly responsible for the code base it will take a lot more work to make it a top-shelf project in terms of participation.

The message underlying all of this is that this software belongs to everyone. Whether you’ve downloaded an eval zip, are using the tools in your project, have blogged or screencast about spark, or have submitted several patches you can see in the scc history today. You are all stakeholders in the cultural value of the project, and I believe it’s this sense of ownership that makes the vibrant, explosive open source cultures on other platforms.

That said, I think some artifacts and activities are missing, and for that I apologize. At the moment there’s not a good roadmap and the issue/task tracking seems suboptimal. There are also some bits on the ci server that could be posted as ctp on codeplex which have the mvc 2 fix and the recent pull requests integrated. I’ll reply here if there’s any news on those counts.

The current focus at the moment, of course, is all about mvc 2 readiness and with a look at vs2010 secondarily.

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