[Ldsoss] Survey Results

[Paul Penrod]

Pat,

Desiring development conferences should not be a surprise.

In the private sector, that is a major source of revenue to the people 
that put them
on and a major social event for those in their respective discipline. I 
don't personally
find them all that educational for the money spent, but it is a valuable 
source of
networking for developers and businesses, as well as an occasion where 
numerous
topics are presented, discussed and debated - so there is merit at 
several levels.

Logistically, I would expect that any type of conference would not be 
forthcoming
until the Church has matured a bit in terms of it's relationship with 
OSS developers
at large and the number of stable efforts underway.

However, I can see mini-conferences taking place at established venues, 
such as
Genealogical conferences and other Church sponsored forae, where it 
makes sense
to do so.

With the API venue, it would make sense that the Church provide the gold 
source
repository for such an effort and make use of existing distribution 
outlets, such as
SourceForge, etc. so there is an audit path to the code and it doesn't 
fork and
fracture like many projects do when there is little control on source 
distribution from
the top.

I do agree with you about the mailing lists and the Wiki as a community 
effort.

...Paul

pat eyler wrote:
> I have to admit to being surprised at the results on question 16:
>> From 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest, please rate which
> services you feel the Church should provide through a sponsorship
> to the LDS development community?
>
> Some of the answers make sense, but baffled by one of them:
> Forum software        2.64
> Wiki        3.33
> Source code repository    3.80
> Mailing lists        3.53
> Provide APIs to data provided by the Church    4.69
> Development conferences        2.74
> News letters    3.00
>
>
> APIs make sense to sit up at the top, but Wikis and to a lesser
> degree newsletters and source code repositories are easy to
> set up and host, but a conference is something that would be
> hard to put together, advertise, and pull of without some kind
> of sponsorship.
>
>> From a pragmatic perspective, it seems like the church is much
> more capable of doing two things than anyone else:  providing
> APIs and hosting/sponsoring conferences -- anything else
> would be nice, but could be handled by the community.
>