[BioRuby] Restyling BioRuby.org

[Fields, Christopher J]

Um, that was sent a little early :P

Saw a unicorn and distractedly hit the 'send'...

On Feb 21, 2012, at 12:54 PM, Christopher Fields wrote:

> On Feb 21, 2012, at 5:29 AM, Raoul Bonnal wrote:
> 
>> Hi Pjotr, Hilmar and others,
>> ...
>> 
>>> 4. One for you Hilmar: does the OBF actually encourage inertia in the Bio*
>>>  projects? 
>>> 
>>> It is appears to me that sitting leadership is reluctant to
>>> give away their positions. I have discussed this with Chris Fields
>>> last year. We agreed that there are also few to take over the helm.
>>> So...
>> I don't see how OBF could push the projects, in case of founds they would be
>> distributed equally? We are good people so we are working together promoting
>> our language helping the others. During the last BioHackathon the most
>> astonishing things was seeing Bio Perl/Ruby/Python/Java working (really)
>> together, it was great.
> 
> Bioinformatics problems span languages

My point being, cross-pollination of projects with common problems makes sense.

>>> 5. how do we nurture future leadership?
>>> 
>>> I am old and cynical enough to know people mostly work for their own
>>> direct benefit (their itch, so tho speak) in OSS, or anywhere else.
>>> Still, I am going to poke and prod for some time, to see if we can
>>> make change. I believe Bio* projects are at fork in the road. Which
>>> one are we going to take?
>> 
>>> Should BioRuby exist as it is, or should we
>>> use it as a breeding ground for young developers. Same question really
>>> for BioPython and BioPerl.
>> Not very clear, at least to me.

You can probably have it every way, make a toolkit that the community can use and have it be a means to bring in additional developers to attempt to add or improve upon functionality.  That's how I got involved with bioperl.

>>> The BioRuby community is almost in a coma, I think. Despite 180
>>> readers of the ML. I see the same people engaging, and interestingly,
>>> a significant number of messages from Biopython and BioPerl
>>> leadership. Thank you for that. BioRuby is just coming out of its
>>> shell, and you are helping.

There is a favorite term of mine that was coined back in the early Perl days, 'being Warnocked':

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock's_dilemma

Lack of a response to a question could mean a lot of things.  If you absolutely need a response, an email thread may not be the best option (maybe a survey…)

>>> 6. What is needed to get BioRuby out of the comatose state?
>>> 
>>> With BioRuby we have had lively discussions before, but they tend to
>>> peter out. We can reason about this, but I think it goes back to
>>> leadership again.
>> I don't know how to solve this issue... The democratic process you suggested
>> some time ago ? Which is the workload, which is the coding power we have ?
>> Which are the languages we can rely on for performances (it means which is
>> the knowledge of the people around here )? Do we want to support Jruby?
>> Suppose we now need a new feature in BioRuby, which one ? Do we want to
>> participate to GSoC ? YES and we MUST there is no doubt and we NEED to write
>> good proposals but everything should be made as a community not only as a
>> group of passionate developers.

Developers tend to work hard on projects they are passionate about; if the website project or others aren't gathering input, it's possibly b/c there isn't anyone passionate about it.  Or as Naohisa indicated, there hasn't been enough time to adequately respond.  As mentioned above, everyone has a day $job and can't dedicate a lot of time to discussions.

>> LANGUAGES:
>> D or Scala, I don't know that I'm just curious and eager to learn. Most of
>> my work is managing large scale data and interconnecting them extracting
>> information etc... I would say, why not Hadoop ?
>> We are just a piece of a bigger ecosystem, the problem is that most of the
>> time "setting up" each piece is a pain in the ass.
>> 
>> WEBSITE Proposals:
>> Why not create and post images, an image per page. Is a usual approach for
>> proposing new layouts.
>> 
>> 
>> We are growing and this kind of discussions are a natural process.
>> --
>> Ra

Yes, but I think you have to balance that with actual work (code).  Theoreticals and pet projects work only up to a point, you have to both establish a project's usefulness to the community, and even then sometimes the community doesn't immediately pick it up.

chris