IntroductionAs most of you will probably know, many projects here tend to die, especially the bigger or more complex ones.
Well, I had an idea that might be able to decrease the number of death projects: We'll team up with some people here on this site (everyone is free to join, regardless of programming skills), and decide on a project to pick up (As long as we have the author's permission to do this). Then, we'll divide the uncompleted part of the project in bite-sized chunks and distribute those chunks to the members of our team that are willing to cooperate in this project. Because everyone will now only have to do a small part of a project, it's far easier to bring it to completion, and it won't take nearly as much time as finishing a complete project, which should decrease the chance of people getting bored with it and putting it asside.
Off course, I nead people to join this team, or else this idea will certainly fail. And I'll be honest: community project don't have a very big chance of success on calculator forums. I just hope that it'll go better with this one because it's lost of small projects instead of one big one.
GuidelinesPlease be aware of these guidelines when you join this team:
- Programming knoledge is advised when you want to joint his team, however, it isn't required. For some projects, we will probably need spriters as well.
- The author of the project being worked on will act as the team leader (to improve consistency in the project), unless:
- The author doesn't want to work on his project anymore, or
- The author will work with us, but doesn't want to be the leader
In those cases, a democratically chosen volounteer will become the leader.
- When you decide to join the team, be aware that we may not start by reviving your project first.
- Anything you create for the team belongs to the whole team. If you decide to quit the team for a certain reason, you shouldn't be able to force the rest of the team to redo your work by suddenly dissalowing them from using your part.
- Please don't join just to get only your project completed. When you join, do it because you want to revive projects of this community
Proposed project flow (may change in the future)We won't start with a project right away, because I first want to see if there's enough intrest to actually pull this off. If the team is big enough, we'll start by shoosing a project in the way described below, but to not abuse this, the first project we'll work on will not be one of mine.
1) We'll shose a project amongst the dead projects owned by our team members.
2) If we feel like an other project should be finished before those of our team, we'll try to contact the author asking for the source code and the permission to complete their projects. We'll also try to ask the author as much as we need to know to finish the project in the way he intended it to be.
3) Once the project is selected, we'll check what parts are already fully functional, which parts have to be fixed and which parts are not written yet or have to be entirely rewritten.
4) All those parts get divided into 'modules' based on their function (so they can be put together more easily), and divided amongst the team, based on both what certain people like to do and based on skill (mainly so that speed-sensitive parts can be written by people that write more optimized code).
5) Everyone will be regularly asked to upload the source files and resources they have created to a cloud storage*, so that everyone can see how the whole project is coming along. We may also need a place to discus the code.
6) Hopefully, we manage to complete the project. Then we'll make sure we put the names of our team in the credits, among with the original author and everyone who was in the original credits.
7) Choose the next project (Goto 1)
ConclusionSo, if you are interested in joining this team and performing some CPR on some neat projects that just died too soon, please say so in a reply, and also include your GitHub name. (EDIT: poll added. Please vote in it so we can all easily see how many are willing to participate)
Also if you want to change something about the guidelines or project flow, or just want to add something to this discussion, please do so in a reply.
*For the cloud storage, princetonlion.tibd has created a github that you can access
here.