People who have been following the centos-devel list would have noticed a ressurection of the CentOS website Ver2 effort[1]. Which is a great sign, however, the intensity and the enthusiasm shown is about at par with the efforts that went into creating the original plan - a few years back. And the one thing that stands out from that effort was that almost always, we had communication issues between the various people doing the various tasks, there was a clear missing internal-customer, there were parallel efforts for some tasks where the teams didnt know someone else was also doing the same thing, at the same time. This time, it looks like we might be heading back into the same sort of a situation. And I say that mostly since one can already see people trying to solve problems we might not have, as well as trying to expand on the actual deliveryable proposal. Feature creep, from the outside in. Dont get me wrong, I am not being negative about whats going on, its great! The fact that this effort is getting off the ground is very good news, One thing that CentOS really does ned is a better, more functional and easy to navigate website.

Thinking about the task and communication side of things, I was wondering if perhaps we could adopt an agile sort of a development format. Are there any other open source distributed communities who have been able to adopt such a process ? I am sure there must be some. Perhaps we should look at how they did the coordination and how they worked with the idea of the 'development sprint'. Working on a delivery dates by fixed date is'nt going to work out too well, after all this is still people contributing their spare time and a best-effort situation. But on the other hand, we still need something in place that allows the other developers, admin and design people to keep track of each individual task thread. So the thing is, if there are other projects that have done something o this nature, what tools were used ?

I know that mingle ( http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/mingle-agile-project-management ) has a license that allows us to use it for open source projects without any cost. Also, there is an OpenAtrium install within the .centos.org space, is that worth looking into ? I suspect getting OpenAtrium into a format we like, might need some php side development. And starting a project by developing on the management tool isnt the best way forward. There is also Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ ) which is a hosted service. I know they recently announced that they were no longer going to be totally free anymore; but from what I can tell all public projects are still free to host, and memebers are not charged anything to join those projects.

Recently there has also been talk about AgileFant ( http://www.agilefant.org/ ), and there is xplanner ( http://www.xplanner.org/ ). Neither of which I've used. Does anyone have opinions ? Thoughts ?

- KB

[1] Maybe it should be called Website Ver2.1!