[Coin-discuss] Re: encouraging contributions to COIN

[Matthew Galati]

Hello everyone,

I am somewhat of newbie to COIN but have been working with developing an
application using BCP for a few months now. I would like to second the
idea put forth by Brady on making a public contact list for the work
being done on COIN-related projects - this list should contain not only
new development and pending contributions, but also users and a short
description of their application. I think this could benefit everyone
and help grow the community base of users (and therefore, testers) and
contributors.

I would also be willing to take responsibility for keeping this list
current along with Brady. Perhaps a way to split up the responsibility
is to have one person responsible to organize the list of
users/contributors for each project component. I, for example, could
assume responsibility for BCP.

For the list administrator, if this sounds like a good idea or if
something like this is already in the works - let me know. For any
willing users out there, feel free to send me an informal email
(magh at lehigh.edu) with a contact point and a short description of what
you are doing.

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew Galati
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA - Operations Research, M.S.
Stetson University, Deland, FL - Mathematics, B.S.
Office Phone: 610-758-4042
Email: magh at lehigh.edu, magal11 at us.ibm.com
URL: http://www.lehigh.edu/~magh/magh.html



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It's great that there's more development going on in COIN than I was
aware of.  A lot more!

I guess the usual model has been that a contributor offers some code,
and one or more core developers work closely with them behind the
scenes to do the crucial work of adapting and improving the code for
integration into the distribution.

I apologize to anyone who felt that my last email was a critique along
the lines of "you aren't working fast enough".  That was not my
intention.  It's clear to me that there has and is lots of work being
done that isn't generally visible.  I believe that we can attract more
users and volunteers, however, if we make some of this activity more
visible.  Then no one will have to wonder why it sometimes takes a
while for changes to appear.

Here are my thoughts along those lines:

- I am very much in favor of Lou's suggestion of having some sort of
  "development" repository.  Code could be placed there as soon as any
  ownership issues are resolved and the contributor is willing.  This
  in itself would do a lot to make the process more visible and has
  the potential to attract other people to help with
  platform-compatibility issues or whatever problems are being faced.

- Thanks, Robin, for such a quick reply to my questions.  I'd like to
  incorporate some of these answers into the web page.  My first
  choice would be to add another page titled something like "How You
  Can Help".  This could cover using COIN (where to send questions,
  bugs, or suggestions) as well as contributing to COIN.
  Alternatively we could just add some questions to the FAQ.  I'll put
  together a draft and post it to this list next week.

- I do think it would be worthwhile posting some information about
  what projects are "in the works" or have been suggested (as long as
  contributors are comfortable with it).  This could just be a
  sentence or two description of the effort as well as the current
  status and possibly a contact person if someone wants more
  information.  I imagine just keeping this list on the website and
  updating it every two-four weeks.  I'm willing to take
  responsibility for getting this together (unless someone else wants
  to!), but I'd like to hear what other people think would be best.

Brady

----------------
Brady Hunsaker
Georgia Institute of Technology
Program in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

E-mail address:   hunsaker at isye.gatech.edu