Recently I was being kept busy by the constant stream of side tasks Xenko require.
Some people are already helping immensely (thanks a lot!) and some are recently quite busy with personal/professional life.
As a result, I would like to ask the help from more community to share some of those tasks.
Ideally, I would like Xenko to be little bit less dependent on me and be supported by the larger community.
Also, this would ideally allow me to focus back more on technical lead, engineering and R&D.
Here’s a quick (non-exhaustive) list of long-running tasks. Several of those were not even being taken care of right now due to lack of resources.
Community management
Product management
Project management
Blog posts
Website management/update
Promotion videos
Marketing/promotion
Documentation
Server admin (teamcity, forums, cloudflare, SSL certs, etc.)
Forum moderation
Build/test engineer (teamcity, automate testing on mobile/linux/osx, etc.)
Governance board? (might need some discussion)
Name/logo change: need somebody to organize discussion/vote/decision process
Of course, multiple people are welcome for each task, and some tasks could be intermittent (i.e. somebody want to do a specific series of blog post).
If you’re interested to help, please step-up, any help is welcome!
This list could be displayed on Github or a planning page somewhere, so that we always have the latest version. We could reference to github users.
You can add definitely me to the Documentation and Blog posts. I want to help out with Name change too, but the core-technical part is probably to far fetched.
What falls under Project management? Is this something in the lines like:
Keeping track of the roadmap, related pull requests statusses, in general ‘What is in the works?’
Keeping track of community wishlist
Keeping track of which contributors are active on roadmap points?
Blogs should not only be the xenko launcher and site blog. The Patreon page blog could use regular blog posts too.
Great offer!
I would suggest starting in the following way. The first thing we need is to hold general gatherings of all community members (notify everyone in advance), and, depending on the knowledge or interest of each of the members, form groups (mini teams) that would deal with each of these areas. I am sure there will be many who want to work in one of the areas.
I do not mind taking part in the rebranding of the engine, which would include its appearance, name and logo.
I would look to other open source projects for a successful model to base the label’s non-profit on. This needs to take on a real legal form. I’m not sure what efforts have been made here already yet Blender seems to stick out as the most successful not-for-profit model to follow.
Also, it would be great if the organization sponsored several open source games in the same manner that Blender sponsored the production of it’s open source films… This would provide a wealth of knowledge and provide even more examples of how to use Xenko.
I’m not in a position to contribute but I’m watching with eager expectation of your success… I will help in the forums as much as I can.
Looks a bit like Jira. Thanks for pointing this out.
Currently there is this roadmap on github. But it feels rather non-used. I think we can attract more people by having a more active planning and blogs. Even if features are not being worked on, it is important to update its status so now and then, so that people will see that it at least is not forgotten. I would be happy to help out with this. Want to do a hangouts meeting to get up to speed on this?
I think having a vague roadmap, very few blog posts showing direction and progress, and a forum with tumbleweeds blowing through, are big problems in terms of attracting interest.
TBH, when I’ve suggested people have a look at Xenko, they typically say that they’re not convinced the project has legs, and wouldn’t want to invest time in it. I think a focus on clarity of the roadmap, the aims of the project, and regular updates, could make a significant difference.
Yes project management would be something along the lines you said.
(Note: project/product manager probably makes more sense when we’ll have an actual team)
I didn’t specify roles exactly because I would prefer people to come up with specific idea that match their skill/desire. Some people might overlap multiple tasks or take care of a small part of one.
For example, somebody wants to promote game james with Xenko, so he would take care of blog posts, promotion and marketing related to that (it spans multiple of the tasks I listed, but only for this specific area).
The reason is, I wouldn’t want to end up having to micro manage everybody (esp. in area I don’t know well such as marketing) and I also want to decentralize little bit more the project.
So it would be great to first find autonomous people able to take care of part of the project. They would give the general direction and they later could split work with additional people willing to help.
Little bit similar to what you are doing with the doc (you have more knowledge in that area so you know waht needs to be improved, i.e. video, then add tutorial, improve theme, etc.).
Concerning the renaming, somebody could take care of the community-related & non-technical part of the name change (i.e. decide how to find/choose name and execute that plan), while some other people (i.e. me) take care of the implementation. I don’t expect a single person would have to take care of both (but if they could, no problem of course!).
Anyway, I agree it should be little bit more detailed, and probably list some more specific examples.
Could I suggest, though, that more people might be interested in getting involved if there was a bit more clarity about the direction of Xenko? For example, we had news of Community Meeting #2 back in July, but no news since on the outcome. Were any decisions taken? Have goals, areas of focus, and priorities been set? Is there a clear list of issues targeted for the next release? What progress has been made since, and so on?
It’s difficult to know whether one would want to contribute time to a project, when it’s not really clear what exactly the project is aiming to be, or even if such clarity exists.
Thanks for the help with the docs Jarmo. If you could focus on examples that would be great. The documentation repo Xenko-docs might be merged in to the xenko repo. I also have quite a bit of changes ready for merging in to xenko-docs. I would recommend waiting with making changes, but if you have anything that you want to see changed/added, please let me know. I will do my best to merge it in with the upcoming changes. I don’t know if I am leading it, but I am willing to put a lot of effort in to updating the docs.
@xen2 Can I help with creating an overview of what people are working on and getting a temporary task/status overview? Perhaps I can add documentation improvement to the road map and subtasks there. I want to make full usage of https://github.com/features/project-management/ if possible. Or use other tools like the suggested Freedcamp.
Documentation current tasks status
Documentation page should support a wide theme. Status: ready for merge. Sending in pull request to xenko-docs in by mid september.
Updating manual pages and screenshots. Status: ready for merge. various pages are updated. Various screenshots are updated. Sending in pull request in by mid september
Possible merging of Xenko-docs to Xenko. Status: in negotiation with @xen2 if, how and when.
Tutorial section. Status: C# basics almost fully documented and Tutorials solution is ready. Location of the Tutorials solution (or it being a template) has not been decided. Dependency on possible Xenko-docs merge to Xenko. Estimated, end of september 2019.
API section improvement. Onhold, finishing up tutorial section first. Note: trouble with generating the API pages locally.
I will do some experimenting on my own branch before adding all sorts of stuff on the official branch. I will be in touch if there is a permission problem.
Merging the Xenko-docs to Xenko is a big step, something I would rather leave in the hands of those who have more experience with GIT. Is this something you (@xen2) want to do?
Does patreon allow you to add an additional user who can take care of only blogging things? That way I could post interesting things there too. Potential backers will find it much more appealing I think.
Same thing for the Xenko blog/ Launcher blog. I want to prepare a first blog post, to get some more activity out there. Don’t worry, I wont post stuff until it is reviewed by several key users.
Sure, I can assist with any big git change/move!
Mostly need to decide if we merge or not.
I have just checked size, and with xenko-docs at 1.3gb already (and growing), maybe it’s better to keep the tutorials in xenko-docs for now (just like you did in your branch).
We can easily move them around later if necessary.
We could consider merging everything in one repo later with https://vfsforgit.org/ once github supports it.
Github project management
So I played around a little bit with Github project management system, but I am not really finding it super nice to work with or look at. Sure the embedded use of issues, requests and tags is nice, but I do not really get that ‘clear project overview’ vibe as I would have hoped. I am accustomed to Jira and confluence so that probably plays a big role.
I currently locked the project to prevent everyone from joining. If you are interested in having a look, send me pm with your email.
Let me know what you think.
I really need to know that location of where I can store the tutorials project. If it would become a template I can just put in Xenko source. But if is just a regular project you download from the tutorial page, what would be the best location? This also affects how the project is versioned.
That is quite a lot of money you lose, just for posting a blog. I wouldn’t recommend it then.
I did not expect that blog posts had to be made via a pullrequest and are actual part of the repo. But it is fine, as long as it works.
Sure, freecamp sounds good if it fits your requirements. I will look into it for my own needs as well.
FYI I was using ZenHub (github addon) little bit, but it doesn’t include Gantt chart and the likes.
Which do you think is better for the user experience of being able to open the project on his computer?
Create project from Xenko => New Project => Tutorials?
⇒ move project to Xenko samples dir
Download it from the documentation page?
⇒ keep project in xenko-docs
Github new project, one per tutorial project/game (create new github repo)
⇒ then add project as git submodule of xenko-docs to be able to do code snippets?
I think having a button where you can download the tutorials project is good place to start. The download button than refers to the separate repository that has versions tagged. I will have to lookup the submodule listing (never done that that before) but it sounds useful. I will use the xenko’s editor configs to style the code properly.
The download zip could containing the executable and the tutorials project folder.
Several users have joined the Freedcamp project, which is great. Now that that has happened, I can start creating some new tasks and assign them to users. The ‘Engine development’ category is still a little empty, but I hope to get some tasks in there soon. The important thing to not do here is create a 1 on 1 replica of github issues. Freedcamp server more more as a general task overview. Everyone who has joined can freely create, edit, move around and assign tasks.
Keeping the feedback on this project flowing is really important, so don’t be afraid to reach out!
Some additional notes:
Since Discord is the more active discussion environment for everyone, it might be useful to have a general contributors chat room (or just use #contributors->developers), were announcements can be made. Right now I want to message only the members of the project, but not all of them have a forum account (I think). I also think the PM messages on the forum are ‘less’ visited than discord.
Freedcamp offers a free discussion module, but I have not enabled it since we already have the forum and discord chats. If it proves to be a requirement in the future, it can always be enabled.
