Category: Community

Just a quick note: The Google Summer of Code student application deadline has been extended to March 26th! This gives you a little more time to get your proposals in. If you’re interested, take a look at our ideas page.

So far, only 2 of the 6 proposals we have received are under any kind of serious consideration.

MusicBrainz has applied to be a mentoring organization for Google’s Summer of Code project. Google will actually pay students to spend their summer hacking on open source projects and I’m hoping that some students who are excited by MusicBrainz will apply to this project and spend their summer improving MusicBrainz.

If you’re a student and are interested in this, check out the link above and read up on the project. Then take a look at SummerOfCodeIdeas for some of the projects that I think could be done in the scope of Summer of Code.

They will begin taking student applications starting today and the window to apply isn’t terribly large, I think. So, if you’re interested, don’t dawdle and get your application in ASAP.

Post questions in the comments if you have them!

I’m leaving for SXSW in Austin in a few minutes. Are you going? If so, if you care to meet up and have a coffee/beer, please post a comment below and I’ll get in touch and arrange for a time to meet up.

Collaboration of the Month is a month long, group effort at cleaning up a well-known artists MusicBrainz entry. The first subject is The Beatles.

You don’t need to know a lot about the artist to help out, just make sure you do your research and enter edit notes. It’s a great way to learn about more about an artist. Impress your friends with your in-depth knowledge of The Beatles Mexican promo singles!

Resources can be listed on the wiki page and problems can be discussed in the forum topic.

For the second time now I’ve received a sponsorship request from a Poker site. This poker site would like to pay us $500 in exchange for putting a link to their poker site on the metabrainz.org sponsors page. I’m certain that this is just a way for these sites to boost their Google PageRank — a marketing campaign of sorts. They obviously cannot expect much traffic from us (that page was visited less than 5000 times last month), and I doubt that anyone would click on that link.

MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz has nothing to do with Poker, but we could always use $500.

I’m at a loss what to do. What do you think we should do?

UPDATE: The feedback I’ve gotten has been mixed, but the comment from Chris DiBona of Google cinched it for me — no poker links on MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz.

Technorati Tags: donation, metabrainz

Faced with everyone and their mom leaving town for the thanksgiving break and friend of mine and myself found some really cheap tickets to Amsterdam. So, I’m off for a week starting tomorrow — fortunately this trip is all vacation and no business. Hopefully it will be low stress, leaving some room for me to have a beer with fellow MusicBrainerz:

What: Have a beer with the MusicBrainz evil overlord

Where: Amsterdam, exact location TBD

When: Sunday, November 26th, 6pm

Who: You and any brainerz who care to sit and chat about MusicBrainz

If you’re interested, please send me an email at rob [at] musicbrainz (dot) org. If you have a suggestion on where we should meet, please send it along. If I get no suggestions, we’ll probably go to my favorite Belgian beer bar off Nieuwendijk where we had beers last time we met in Amsterdam.

Technorati Tags: beer, pub meeting, amsterdam

In the last weeks I have been talking to Yalaforge, Lukas, Robert and Keschte about integrating Keschte back into MusicBrainz server development. Now, one thing that I have learned from the GreatDispute is not to do mediating behind the scenes, but to MakeIssuesPublic. Therefore I will now tell you what came out of these talks:

Robert said that he owes Keschte a second chance — if only because the way he handled the conflict was shitty — but that he “does not really believe in it”.

Keschte told me that he wants to work on mbserver again, but on the other hand he will wait and see how the MB community evolves after the dispute. He also said that he probably does not want to start seriously getting involved before next year.

So that’s the situation. There is also a lot of hurt pride and lost trust in there. This does not make things easier. However that is Rob and Keschte’s problem, and nobody can help them with it.

What I can do, and kind of did, was to negotiate a kind of compromise — a situation in which both of them could work together again. This is what it could look like:

• Keschte would get a kind of sovereign territory in which he can work his way, while Rob can be sure that whatever comes out of it has been thoroughly checked and is of good quality.
• Keschte does not want to work alone and needs feedback from someone. Robert made very explicit that he cannot and will not fulfill this role. However co-hackers, interested users could do this. That means that Keschte’s development process would have to be opened up to the community. He would need communication tools like forums, a dev-blog, a test server of his own on which “Keschte’s Bleeding Edge” is always available to the public, etc.
• On the other hand, Keschte would have to work more focused, in better delimited projects, one at a time, than he has on the XHTML server project. Initially this could mean to work with branches (it is clear that major refactoring cannot be done this way, but ArtistPageRedesign could).
• I do not believe that bug triaging and buffers between Keschte and the users would do any good. Those were discussed in a chat session mediated by Lauri. As I wrote at the end of the Great Dispute, Keschte had been set up in a double bind. You cannot solve this kind of problems with padding, only by changing the setting.

So, this is what it could look like. I say “could”, because both Keschte and Robert stated that they will not put a lot of work into making this happen now. For me this means that I won’t do it either. While I would love to help both in setting up a “sovereign territory” which is helpful and acceptable to both, I will not try to do all the work that they are not willing to do.

The conclusion? There currently is no MusivBrainz server developer. Sad thing, but the truth.

The suggestion of a bug triage mailing list has been turned into a reality:

• subscribe to mb-bugs
• view mb-bugs archives

The purpose of this mailing list is to give the community more insight into bugs/enhancements/tasks as they enter the bug tracking system and as they move through the various stages. People who subscribe to this list will be able to monitor the chatter between developers and users more effectively than before. If you’ve wondered what bugs are being reported and what bugs are being closed, join this list.

Technorati Tags: communities, musicbrainz

The conflict resolution chat has been set for this weekend:

• Date: Sunday, October 1st, 1200 PDT/1500 EDT/2000 GMT/2100 CEST
• Moderator: Lauri Watts
• Location: IRC channel #musicbrainz on irc.freenode.net

The goal of this chat session will be to brainstorm about a system where the community can take part in resolving disputes that arise in the MusicBrainz community. The agenda for this chat will be posted in the next couple of days.

Technorati Tags: communities, musicbrainz