Community Crafting

Preparations for the re-launch of Pandion are well underway now. It's a big change from the old approach to running Pandion.

The project development slowed and (all-but-)died over the last two years. There are several reasons for this:

• The license was not Free Software. Other developers and companies were reluctant to take over or invest time into a closed code base. The open source / non-free license that Pandion used was enough to attract minor patches and contributions, but not sustainable long term.
• Shortage of community collaboration tools. Having a static website and a forum was inadequate. The phpBB v2 based forum succumbed to comment and profile spam over and over again. Pandion users would keep posting the same questions and bug reports. Contributors had little way to communicate with their users.
• Project leadership went AWOL. People's priorities change and for a while Sebastiaan and Dries just couldn't work on Pandion. Despite their best efforts (thanks reaxer!) it was impossible for other contributors to take Pandion forward.
  

The new focus will be on efficient collaboration using all the latest and greatest open source project management tools. Learning from past mistakes and the way other successful projects are run, I'm setting up various services for Pandion's community. New developers will find it easier to learn the code base. Users will be able to track progress of ther bug reports and use better up-to-date documentation. Administrators deploying Pandion can keep an eye on roadmap milestones and prepare well in advance for any update pushes.

Pandion went into a long, dark night but the new dawn is near. :-)