What do you guys think of the new sf.net clone by Ms aka www.codeplex.com?
Will you consider registering a DNN project?
Could it be an oportunity to upgrade DNN's development process?
Current Beta seems to show that DNN improvement is becoming increasingly complex to cope with by the core team left alone. The Platinum Release Forum, Public Bug tracker, and all the many dedicated forums get filled up with loads of requests, and I can imagine the pain it must be for the handful of core members on the grill to spend hours acknowledging the ambient burdenning, handling most of the code analysis and dealing with all the code transactions by themselves.
Now that DNN is so big, and as that new portal will provide a source control plateform targeted at .Net and tightly integrated with VS2005 (I guess that's the progress to expect from sf.net and gotdotnet ) safely hosted and maintained in MS DataCenters (another burden less), and sharing the place with other friendly project (what about the Atlas toolkit?), would you consider making the move to widen code access, and maybe even allow targeted developers (platinum sponsors?) to submit transactions to be moderated by the core team?
I'm not sure about the granularity that CodePlex will provide in managing external contribution, but if proven flexible enough, that would in my opinion save a lot of time and energy to the core, since I'm pretty sure many long time DNN users would be happy contributing a few well documented transactions rather than filling up the forums trying to be read, and core developers could monitor all that from their IDE without having to run between the various forum places.
Of course, that would require a special focus on discipline and management, and the opening process should be kept progressive, but haven't we reached the point when there are so many things to deal with, so many requests to consider, that there is little place left for management and strategy inside the core team, whom initial small group synergy may be turning into permanent suffocation. My suggestion is then to try and leave the dirty job to all those happy to do it, rather monitoring and moderating external contributions, thus saving time for the real stuff.
Well all this is just about redistributing the roles and leveraging the users contributions while the project scales up, which surely is one of your main concern.
Thanks for (re)considering that issue with regards to the current situation and oportunities.