On Fri, January 27, 2012 3:05 am, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
how do you prevent noise from overwhelming signal?
Rules. We nerds tend to view the world in binary: one or zero, good or bad, my way or the highway, this extreme or that extreme, the Cathedral or the Bazaar. Reality tends to be much more nuanced. My experience and observations have convinced me that every successful open source project has been lead by a strong leader: Eric Young with OpenSSL, Julian Smart with wxWidgets, Andrew Tridgell with Samba and rsync, Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler with zlib, and of course Linus Torvalds with Linux. While Torvalds has personally written only about 2% of the Linux kernel, he remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel. I believe that this level of involvement and control by the founding visionary is the principal reason that Linux is solid, stable and hasn't simply dissipated. My single greatest criticism of Project Gutenberg is, and always has been, its chaotic and anarchistic nature. I don't believe people can do good work in a totally free-form environment; in fact I don't believe anything can be accomplished at all. As a result, rules have evolved at PG, but the public assertion that PG is totally unfettered has cause most of these rules to remain covert. Mr. Haines has developed his set of rules, Mr. Perathoner has developed his set of rules, and Mr. Hart had developed his own set of rules. Sometimes these rules were inconsistent, just as the published rules can be inconsistent. As Mr. Adcock has pointed out, trying to get a document into the PG database while complying with these unwritten rules can be maddening. I would not be surprised if the primary reason that DP has become virtually the only source for PG documents is because volunteers know that by working through DP they at least have a framework to work in. The rules may foster productivity or they may hinder it, depending on your viewpoint, but at least everyone knows what the rules are. As a software developer, my greatest challenge is not in developing programs, but in getting my customers to tell me exactly what problem needs to be solved, and what constraints there are on the solution (I'm not interested in /how/ they think the problem should be solved; that's /my/ job). So, Mr. Newby, I don't think that lack of good tools is an issue; what is missing is lack of vision. Here's my proposal, in broad terms: 1. Project Gutenberg will provide support for a new project; let's call it Project WOPR (Hello, Joshua ... ). There will be no restrictions from PG on the scope or methods of the project (except, of course, those necessary to comply with United States' law). 2. Joshua Hutchinson will be designated benevolent dictator of the project. He need not make more that 2% of the rules, or provide more than 2% of the effort, but he gets to ultimately decide which rules are acceptable, and whether any particular individual's efforts satisfy the rules. The rest of us can whine, moan, complain, cajole or boycott, but only Mr. Hutchinson decides. He can't tell me what I must do, but he may tell me what he will accept. BUT... 3. All the rules will be published, and no volunteer effort will be rejected based on failure to comply with an unpublished rule. I have lots of ideas about what the rules should be, some of which may be unacceptable. But without a commitment to "the rule of law," and an established mechanism for rules to be created, my ideas are just dust in the wind.