Provide better community feedback

[ArneBachmann]

I have reported several issues, but there´s no activity whatsoever. The project appears dead to the outside user. There should be discussion on gitter, and also in the issues here, probably some gists...

[ArneBachmann]

On the other hand, the Mantis bugtracker is full of TODOs, but it´s neither user-facing nor necessary for users to see the vast amount of work planned.

[rmischke-dlr]

Hi Arne,

I would not agree that a project with regular releases, including fairly detailed changelogs, looks dead or inactive from the outside. Also, like you mentioned, there is a public issue tracker where everybody can see that issues are being worked on all the time. (Note that there was a brief time when the tracker was inaccessible from the outside, but that was only a temporary DNS issue.)

What is true is that we are not very present on GitHub yet, and that our public community activities are quite limited. At this point, this is mostly a matter of available developer time, and the organizational overhead of such activities.

I also don't quite see what an alternative to the public issue tracker could look like. There is indeed a vast number of open todos and issues there (currently more than 1.100 of them), which is not easy to grasp even for experienced team members. But what approach would you suggest instead? We don't have developer time available to manage an additional "curated" issue-tracker and keep these synchronized both ways. This would also be quite the opposite of more open-source community involvement in my opinion.

Right now, users can always open issues here on GitHub, or directly in the internal issue tracker if they have write access. But issue triaging and roadmap planning is currently only done by the internal development team, as anything else would simply make the process even more complex than it already is. We definitely plan to have more visible developer activity on GitHub in the near future, though.

[ArneBachmann]

Hi Robert,

I know and appreciate that a lot of work is put into RCE, being myself always suprised by the amount of features pushed out, but although we´re colleaguse in the same company I´m trying to get into contact using the official communication channels - this issue tracker - to allow others to contribute and share their experiences as well.

It seems, however, I´m currently the only one reporting issues here, and close to none have been addressed other than "we take it to the other issue tracker" since 2016. This doesn´t look like a lively/friendly community to the outside world, and I´d expect more immediate feedback, even support.

I´m a member/contributor of several open source projects in my spare time, and in each of them the maintainer is usually answering questions, providing quick feedback, and being active on Twitter, Gitter, and Gitlab, helping to build trust and in turn getting back ideas, comments and praise.

I know that in a company context it´s harder to set away time for community-building tasks like that. On the other hand, reducing feature speed and increasing community building might also enhance the quality of available documentation, tutorials, tooling around RCE and create a larger well-tended platform with people being able to help each other.