It’s a lot to get through, but over time, the critical issues should gradually rise to the top, and our core developers can help solve these as quickly as possible. Happy voting, and thanks for all your help so far!
In an effort to bring the community into our development process more, I (ocharles) have built a new little application to help the MusicBrainz community decide exactly what we should focus on. I present to you, the Scheduling Game!
The Scheduling Game
The idea behind this little application is to let the community quickly scan through open issues and decide when they believe they should be fixed. Each editor is presented with 3 options:
Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.
Within 12 months. This ticket should be fixed within a year from now. This means the ticket should be fixed within the year, but is not critical for the next 3 months
Unscheduled. This issue is not pressing and can be fixed much later.
Later, when issues have been voted on by enough people, the developers will try and decide how to schedule work to best fit the needs of the community.
A few disclaimers… Firstly, this is just an experiment! We don’t know how well it will work, though initial testing has shown it to already be quite useful. Secondly, it’s not really much of a game, but I wanted to give it a cute name (I know how picky everyone can be!). Currently only a subset of open tickets are available for voting on – specifically tickets in the “NGS + 1” and “Post NGS” milestones on JIRA, as these milestones are in need of a sorting.
The scheduling game is currently live on my server at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/. You can have a look at the current (anonymous) votes at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/results. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me in IRC as ocharles or email oliver@musicbrainz.org. Happy voting!
The MusicBrainz community has two very active contributors (navap and reosarevok) who do not have and cannot afford to buy decent development machines/laptops. MusicBrainz is carefully watching its finances currently and can’t really afford to spend money on this right now, so I’m curious to see if the community would come together to support these two awesome contributors.
Navap has done a lot of editing and web site improvements (a series of 8 or so nitpick patches that greatly improved the look/feel of NGS) and countless other tasks to improve MusicBrainz. Reosarevok is a very active editor and has recently become our wiki god; he is also wishing to help out more with the development. Both of these two awesome contributors could be more productive with decent machines.
We’re looking to buy two $500 Linux capable machines that have a couple of cores and about 4GB of RAM each. Would you please consider chipping in to help our contributors? You can make a cash donation (please let us know your donation should go towards laptops) or even send a laptop to our contributors. If you’d like to help out with a donation of an actual machine, please leave a comment in the blog and I’ll get in touch with you.
The 11th MusicBrainz summit was held this past weekend in Rotterdam, NL.
It was a very productive weekend with lots of discussions and plenty of social time. We had 17 people in attendance, 5 of which were from our sponsors/partners. The complete summit notes are now available on the wiki.
For those who didn’t attend, here are some of the things you missed out on:
3 lbs of chocolate
banana pizza
stroopwafels
generic beer and energy drinks
overloading the wifi and having to rely on tethered cell phones for wifi access
an extremely high density of Google phones
3 hours of discussion about works
information about BookBrainz
very large traffic lights
Thanks to everyone who came and to warp for being our local contact.
The MusicBrainz summit is going to get started later today and we’re going to have a Google Hangout as our low-budget webcasting solution. You should friend musicbrainz.summit at gmail dot com in Google Plus and then join our Hangout to join in our conversation.
See you online later tonight!
UPDATE: We failed to get the hang out started today. We’ll start our hang-our tomorrow morning at 10am Rotterdam time.
After too many moons of neglect, we finally have a new wiki warden who is going to put some serious effort into sprucing up our wiki. Nicolás Tamargo (user reosarevok) has been promoted to be our new wiki god. His first task is to clean up dead pages and to get rid of a lot of cruft; then he’ll work on improving some doc pages that have been long out of date. Hopefully soon we can get to a state where the wiki is useful, rather than filling us with a sense of dread. 🙂
If you’re interested in helping reosarevok with the wiki, please let him know by leaving a comment here or contacting him directly.
Thanks for taking on our very messy wiki, Reosarevok!
I wanted to remind people that we’re finally having a summit in October. We’ve rented an apartment in Rotterdam, Netherlands as our venue from 13 October to 18 October. On the afternoon of October 13 and most of October 14 we’re going to have a two day-ish hackathon for hacking on various MusicBrainz related things. On the evening of the 14th we’re going to have a social meet and greet event at the apartment. The summit itself will be held on the 15th and 16th, following an unconference like format where the attendees get to set the agenda. Most people will depart Rotterdam on the evening of the 16th. On Monday the 17th, our final day in the apartment, we’re going to have a day focused on MusicBrainz’ commercial users to discuss issues from a commercial perspective.
If you’re a MusicBrainz hacker/supporter and would like to attend, we’re going to cover lodgings and food for a limited number of people through the generous sponsorship of last.fm and MusixMatch. Our budget is not vast, so if you’re interested in attending the event, please sign up on our the summit wiki page. You’ll be responsible for your own transportation to Rotterdam.
Warp, Ollie and myself will be at the apartment the entire time and we’ll be bringing some creature comforts like game consoles and other things to keep ourselves entertained when we’re not discussing or hacking on MusicBrainz.
I’m pleased to announce that Google has pledged another $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation for our annual support!
The Google Open Source Programs Office and all of its awesome people have been supporting us for five years now. Their generous support has allowed us to keep two full time engineers working on our server software. Without Google, MusicBrainz would not be where it is today.
I had originally planned to have a post-NGS celebration and hack day with the MusiXmatch teams in Bologna this month, but timing and costs proved to be an issue. Instead, we’re going to hold a traditional MusicBrainz summit in Warp’s town of Rotterdam, Netherlands. The general idea for this summit is very rough, but I would like to focus on community discussions on the weekend (Oct 15/16) and then focus on customer discussions on Monday the 17 Oct. Everyone would be welcome to attend all portions of the summit, but we’ll have a different focus for different parts of the summit.
I expect the core MusicBrainz team and representatives from Zvooq, Last.fm and MusiXmatch to be at the summit. We’re going to be soliciting for sponsorships in order to help cover the costs of the summit. If you’re interested in attending and/or sponsoring the summit, please comment on this post. Depending on the level of sponsorships we can drum up, we might be able to pay for lodging/food for community members who wish to attend. We’ve made that possible in the past and I would very much like to be able to do that again.
I’m quite looking forward to meeting some of you in Rotterdam!
I’m planning on attending and working on some sort of hack that uses MusicBrainz — would you like to join? If so, drop me a line and register for the event using the link above!
