An Informal Response

April 28th, 2008 | by Ozgur Cem Sen |

I recently across this post on http://forum.mambo-foundation.org. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the project after I stripped myself off my official Mambo Foundation duties. The post below is truly saddening and it’s not even funny for someone who has some idea of what’s going on inside.

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Informal Survey - what can we do to improve the team and community?

In April 2001, Mambo became open source under the GPL - its our foss birthday month right now! Over time, and particularly in the last three years, Mambo has undergone a lot of changes. 2 1/2 years ago we went through the biggest change of all with the Joomla! fork.

At the moment, the team is going through a restructuring so that we are set up properly to take Mambo forward into the future. The way the team worked in 2005 worked well for bringing Mambo back from potential disaster. We have made a few changes along the way but we know we can do better.

One of the things we are looking at doing is taking development discussions out into a mailing list that anyone can join and can contribute ideas to (and even code suggestions). Do you think this is a good idea? If you are a developer, would doing this encourage you to participate?

What else should we look at doing? Are there any barriers to your contributions that we may not be aware of?

The team works hard at being here, on the forums and part of our community. We want Mambo to be inclusive and friendly, and to encourage contributions. How can we improve this?

Share your thoughts here please (constructive only - we want this thread to be something of value that we can use for improving things, not an opportunity for criticism that would only discourage the team).

link to the post

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Since I do not want to discourage the team - or whatever is left of it - I prefer to vent here. For those who do not know already, Mambo Foundation lost three elected team leads in the last 4 months; and I am one of those folks who departed.

I’ve been an active member of the Mambo Foundation, QA & Release Team Lead at some point, and took over the Core Development Team Lead after Chad’s departure. Being known as a patient person, Mambo’s internal political dynamics even got to me, resulting in a not so nice resignation letter. Funny it is, I personally and with Chad collaboratively accomplished more than six months of work if we were to stay with the foundation, in a week.

Al takes over the reigns after my core team departure, and in less than a month, he gives up too. And knowing Al, his resignation letter was probably a bit more colorful than mine.

Now, let’s go back to the drawing board for a second and pop two questions.

Why would three Team Leads depart a big FOSS project in 4 months?

And why the board is still looking for a solution by doing informal public surveys?

I guess, we’ll all just sit tight and watch the fireworks.