[Search-l] Any updates?

[Bani]

Maybe I am completly wrong, but I have the feeling that this is the
current situation:

We could categorize the people who participate in this project in
three types: (a) people who ARE coding (note that this is different
from people who CAN code), (b) people with information retrieval
skills and (c) wiki editors.

Group (a) is working mostly on Grub. The few people who do something
other than Grub are doing user interface stuff. As far as I know no
one is working in how to improve search results except from the Grub
perspective, which IMHO is a necessary but limited approach.

Group (b), in which you are included, is doing nothing to help the project.

Group (c) is still doing the usual every day work of adding content,
removing spam, and trying to organize things a little better. But the
most important "deliverable" of this group is the policy discussion at
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/search:Mini_article/Policy_discussion It
was going well in the beginning but unfortunatly it was abandoned for
over 1 month. Some people recently started editing that page again, so
I hope maybe everyone in that group could take a look at it again and
try to finish a first draft of the policy.

PROBLEM:  communication between groups (a), (b) and (c) is still poor.
Group (a) attemped to improve the communication by broadcasting their
changelog but that information is only understandable by people who
are familiarized enough with the code, and not by the other groups.

How do I think this should work: groups (b) and (c) should be talking
about how to use the community to improve search quality and group (a)
should help both figure out how this could actually be implemented. I
think it is NOT possible to do something while communication with the
developers is still poor, because if there is no feedback about the
likelihood of making a feature happen it is a waste of time for the
other groups to think about new ideas. Please note that this is
different from not accepting the ideas, it is fine to think about
something and later discard it, the problem is when every idea isn't
accepted or discarded. One example is the use of the main and mini
namespaces that was discussed some time ago in the forums. To make it
actually happen the code would have to be changed to point to a
different namespace by default and the database would have to be
updated to change the namespace of a few things. But group (c), who
has proposed this idea, never reached a final decision, and group (a)
maybe  wasn't even aware that this was being discussed to give a
feedback of the possibility of performing that database update without
corrupting all the data.

Why is it not working as it should? As much as projects like this
aren't supposed to have hierarquies, when there are that many people
involved we need some people who have the authority to act as leaders
to point directions for each group so that they can work together for
a common goal. A "Benevolent Dictator" wouldn't be a bad idea.

Well, maybe I'm wrong, but that is my point of view. And to conclude,
I'd like to share with you Gartner's Hype Cycle:
http://banix.info/docs/wikiahypecycle.gif
It should explain why things have been a bit quiet compared to a few months ago.

Regards,
Vanessa


On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 4:02 PM, John McCormac <jmcc at hackwatch.com> wrote:
> The list has been awfully quiet recently. Are there any updates?
>
> Regards...jmcc