This was touched on in the images in video description and Public QCs topic I made earlier, but I figured it deserved its own topic and merited some attention.
There is a general lack of coders on the .org, and those who have volunteered their time in the past have become, for the most part, rather invisible. The site is in need of an overhaul, but of course this cannot be done without experienced coders (or developers)? While at first, when I took some time to try and figure out what would remedy this problem myself (just to toss around ideas), I thought that it could be plausible to hire a developer with donation money for a one-time site overhaul and sort of hope we could maintain it later. But as I'm sure we can all agree, there is probably not enough money laying around to do that, nor would hiring a coder for a site such as this be very vanilla.
So what other ways could we perhaps overhaul the site?
Well, for starters, we could make it a bit more known that we need help.
Right now, the only thing that mentions we need developers is on the front of the members page. It's very old, and tells potential users to join the developers usergroup.?? Which at this point does not exist.
Perhaps if we set up a different system? What if we removed this old notice and came up with a new one, complete with a new usergroup or perhaps a point of contact for some sort of interview process. Maybe a forum announcement combined with a site-wide notice-- this way we could catch many editors who perhaps do not use the forums, or help spread the word around to non-editors.
In addition, what if we were to take the current staff, and work on taking those "higher up" trustworthy ones on a volunteer-basis, and perhaps teaching them basic bits of coding. Not anything that amounts to much, but something that would be good to have- such as simple maintenance of the site if a piece of it breaks and another, more experienced coder is unavailable at that particular time.
While I am unsure of how the power structure works currently, I am under the impression that maybe two people have access to the .org's inner workings, so everything, even small fixes is up to these two people.
If we spread the small load across many already proven trustworthy users, we could leave the simple things to them and give more time to the 'more advanced' things for the more experienced users.
As it stands now, we will always be looking for new developers.?? But how are we supposed to find these developers if we have no actual system to accept new developers?
















