Category: Community

Preparing for the May 15th schema change release

For our last schema change release we had a ton of issues around which tickets we should address and which ones were properly defined for us to work on. I’d like to make this a lot more clear for the next go round; here is what we’re going to do:

Starting today and for the next two weeks, we’re going to seek people to be the champion (sponsor) of a ticket. If you feel strongly about a schema change ticket getting taken care of, you should consider championing this ticket. Once you’ve decided to do adopt a ticket, you should assign the ticket to yourself.

Then, over the next two weeks it will be up to you to do the following:

  1. Derive consensus around the core concept of the ticket. If you go through the process of working up a ticket, but no one agrees with what you’re proposing, you’ve wasted your time. Make sure that you get buy in from others in the community. For instance, if Nikki doesn’t like it, chances are its not going to fly. 🙂
  2. Ensure that the ticket clearly states what needs to be done to implement the ticket. The ticket should essentially become or link to a requirements document. This requirements document should explain what the new feature should do. It should not explain how it should be done — we should leave the how to our developers who are going to implement the feature.
  3. Provide as much supporting documentation as you can. Mock-ups for UIs are deeply appreciated (even if they delve into the how realm of things) and very useful for meaningfully discussing these tickets.
  4. Have the ticket reviewed by a developer for clarity and completeness, then address any issues said developer may raise.

On 19 March, we’re going to look at the list of tickets that people have taken on and choose the ones that are clear enough to move forward. If you’ve done all the work outlined above, the chances are good that your ticket will be chosen to move forward. If your ticket is chosen to move forward, there will be more questions that the developers will raise — hopefully those can be tackled in the space of a week. After that we will take all of the well defined tickets and schedule them for implementation. All the other tickets that are not clear to implement will be rejected and will have to make another pass though this process in the autumn.

If you’re still interested, here is the list of schema change tickets that should be considered for this.

New Style Leader and Updated Proposal Process

Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) is replacing Kuno Woudt (warp) as style leader. This will allow Kuno to fully concentrate on development, and also allow our other style leader Nikki to dedicate more of her time to testing changes and make it less likely for us to have botched releases.

We are also updating the proposal process, and tying it to the Jira tracker, to avoid the manual updating of the proposal table and problems with two people using the same proposal number by mistake. The updated system is at Proposals – the huge table there has been moved to Proposals/History

Mini-Summit Session Notes

Yesterday we held our mini-summit in London to great success. The MusicBrainz team huddled up in a hotel last night and finished writing up notes of everything we covered, and you can now have a look at them on the wiki at MusicBrainz Summit/2012-Mini_Summit/Notes. In general, we provided an update of what’s been happening at MusicBrainz, what’s coming up in the future, and heard how each company are using MusicBrainz. Discussions have started with respect to classical support, but don’t expect anything concrete any time soon!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to this summit and helped make it work – it was great seeing you all!

London pub gathering

On Monday we’re having the MusicBrainz mini-summit in London. Following the summit, starting at 6pm, we’re going to move to the Tower Tavern to have a pint of beer (or a few).

While the summit is open to people who have registered ahead of time, the pub gathering will be open to anyone who would like to join in. We’re not going to have any formal topics scheduled for the gathering — just a friendly gathering of like minded souls and of course, beer!

I hope to see you on Monday evening!

Mini-summit and pub evening in London on January 30

The BBC requested that we convene a meeting with MusicBrainz community members and MusicBrainz developers in London. The goal of this meeting is to open lines of communication between MusicBrainz community members and developers and the BBC. Now that editors from the BBC and its affiliates are using MusicBrainz more, we should aim to properly indoctrinate these editors into MusicBrainz’ community.

I’ve decided to take this opportunity and invite other companies who are using MusicBrainz or are interested in using MusicBrainz to join this meeting. If you are interested in working with MusicBrainz commercially and would like to find out more about MusicBrainz, please feel free to attend this meeting. This all-day mini-summit will focus on the people who attend the summit — the attendees will largely set the agenda for the day. We will have technical, community and business focused representatives present who can talk about nearly all aspects of MusicBrainz.

The meeting will be held on January 30 in central London — the exact venue will be determined shortly. If you are interested in attending our mini-summit, please send me email at rob at musicbrainz dot org. Please tell me who you are, which company you represent and what sorts of topics you would like to see discussed. I’ll start building a rough agenda based on this feedback.

After the meeting we’re going to adjourn to a pub and enjoy a pint of beer. If you’re interested in MusicBrainz more casually or would like to meet some of the people behind MusicBrainz, feel free to pop in. As with the main portion of the meeting, we’ll pick a central London venue closer to the date.

I will mail out information about the mini-summit directly to the attendees, but I will post more information about the pub evening here on this blog.

I hope to see you in London at the end of the month!

Scheduling opened to all unscheduled tickets

We finished making some decisions on a few tickets in IRC today regarding scheduling stuff that was in the Scheduling Game. After this, we decided that it was time to open the game up to all issues that we weren’t sure when to schedule. This means that scheduling.ocharles.org.uk now has approx. 700 issues that we need help scheduling!

For more information on the scheduling game, see the introductory blog post.

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!

Have Your Say In Scheduling

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 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:

  1. Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.
  2. 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
  3. 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!

Looking for sponsors to purchase two development machines

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.

Thanks!

MusicBrainz Summit 11: Rotterdam

Hello everyone,

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.

See you all at the next summit!

Google Hangout coverage for our Summit

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.