[Clipart] Plan for 'openclipart' release

Bryce Harrington bryce at bryceharrington.com
Wed Jun 9 11:04:01 PDT 2004


Let be back up a bit and explain what I'm shooting for with the package
release thing I mentioned yesterday.  

In Open Source theory there is a principle called "Release Early,
Release Often".  What this means is, rather than get everything perfect,
instead release what you've got now and then work on doing some
improvements for the next release.  Instead of waiting until it's
perfect before giving it out, iterate.

The idea being that you put out something imperfect but that people can
start using ASAP, and then gain their feedback and help to make the next
release a little better.

So, basically, that's the heart of my plan.  Gather up what folks have
submitted into a tarball, and post it out there for people to start
using.  The categories may be imperfect, the svg may not work for
everyone, and the metadata may not be very good, but at least it will
give us a starting point.  We build a todo list to work on for future
releases.  And repeat.

Getting onto a release cycle will help us in many ways, as it will force
us to focus efforts towards particular near-term milestones and
objectives.  It's quite easy to get sidetracked into cool but perhaps
impractical or overly ambitious ideas, so having a tangible goal will
force us to prioritize our wants and needs.  Some stuff we just won't
have time or energy to do so we'll have to leave it until later or until
someone steps up to the plate to do it.  Other stuff hopefully we can
get people involved to take it on.  But we don't want to let desire for
perfection stop us from moving forward.

There's four specific objectives I think need to be met for this
release, which I'll list in the next email.

Bryce




More information about the clipart mailing list