Comments on Pandion Blog: Open Source Project Management

A central web page with static pages would be a go...

2008-08-15T17:37:00.000+02:00

A central web page with static pages would be a good place to start, with low maintain cost for you. Under your controll at your site, that is.

The other services should prob. stay where they are now, but be redirected from your static page web server. If those other services fail, just ignore that. It is more confusing for users/developers to "run around" looking for where the service is right now. Importent information could always be announced on your static web page.

IF you need/want to make a release, you could always do that from your site, through bittorrents (which will lower the load on your site).

But change where you have your services is prob. only confusing.

Any way, any release soon? A small bugfix release would show that something is moving, attracting user base.

@ikl: Agreed. In fact one always needs to expec...

2008-07-17T18:13:00.000+02:00
@ikl: Agreed. In fact one always needs to expect components to fail and gracefully degrade service while bringing up alternatives. For example if Twitter has downtime we can quickly hop over to Laconica and keep communicating with the community using other means like the blog, mailing lists, etc. If Amazon S3 is unavailable then file hosting would be quickly redirected to the Slicehost server, Google Code, or another mirror. The only services that cannot be easily replaced are ones that are impossible to host on your own anyway, like Ohloh.

There is another question you should take into con...

2008-07-17T15:54:00.000+02:00
There is another question you should take into consideration: which project tools are of key strategic importance for the project? You may not want to "outsource" these tools to third-party services as it makes your project dependent on these services. For example, Sourceforge.net was offline for several hours this year (at the day we wanted to do a Coccinella release). Our own website stayed online as we do not use Sourceforge.net's hosting services. Also, if Sourceforge.net did not came online at our release day we could have had hosted the files temporarily at our own hosting

Another alternative for task/issue tracking and li...

2008-07-15T05:47:00.000+02:00
Another alternative for task/issue tracking and lightweight project management is Intervals. It is web-based and includes a free plan if you'd like.

Thanks for the feedback. You're right, the title s...

2008-07-14T18:48:00.000+02:00
Thanks for the feedback. You're right, the title should not have been project management but asynchronous collaboration.

As far as issue trackers are concerned I have not yet decided on which one to use. Google Code offers a very basic tool. I don't want the trouble of hosting and maintaining Trac or JIRA on my own server. Any free alternatives out there? I will investigate Wrike. Assembla is also an option.

I agree. Collaboration is the heart of project man...

2008-07-14T10:05:00.000+02:00
I agree. Collaboration is the heart of project management, but it's not project management. You still have dead-lines, tasks, etc. And yeah, a desktop system will never work for an open source team. There are very useful apps, one of them was already mentioned. We're using Wrike. They run special discounts for open source teams, you only have to ask for them. A post about this kind of apps would be definitely helpful.

OK. True enough. But this is not project managemen...

2008-07-14T09:49:00.000+02:00
OK. True enough. But this is not project management. You mainly described the collaboration part of open source development. Beside all these you still need a project management tool to plan and track the projects. Am I wrong? Something like RationalPlan. But obvious not a desktop tool but a network based one. You might think about that and maybe add all the tools that are really needed.