[Bf-committers] BF work todo

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi devs,

I know it's a dangerous topic within open source... paying certain  
developers for contributions usually only works counter productive  
(unless invoked by third parties who have direct benefit from it!).  
Nevertheless, there are a couple of tedious & unpopular tasks we could  
solve by hiring 'professional' support, as for example currently  
already is being done for system administration on our webservers.

The first 'job' I like to mention is still one of the disturbing  
bottlenecks here. Its complexity - requiring specialized knowledge -  
means it's hard to find suitable volunteers for it.

1) projects.blender.org support
- Act as an intermediate between end-users of the projects site and the  
system administrator. So it doesn't involve low level installation or  
coding work, but familiarity with cvs, php and a little bit of sql is  
required.
- Communicate with system administrator on general user requirements  
for the site, including help with configuring gforge upgrades and  
features
- Support users of the projects site with setting up new projects,  
using cvs, adding custom pages, trackers, downloads, etc.
- Maintain/develop a good frontpage or portal to access the projects  
site, including documentation on how to use it
- In general; manage this projects site to have it all working great  
for everyone!

The second job is actually what I already (try to) do, and filling it  
in would also free up my time quite some, to be able to code more for  
example! It's not very urgent right now, and ideally it should be  
solved with volunteers. Creating a paid part-time job for it would  
really depend on finding an 'ideal' candidate in the current team.

2) bf-blender project assistance
- maintain the www.blender3d.org CMS pages on development, especially  
docs for (new) developers on how to use cvs, get blender compiling,  
current projects being worked on, status of projects, etc.
- keep track of scons, makefiles, MSVC issues, and if possible work on  
that
- assist developers on making proper release notes on new features, if  
needed collect/write the documentation or additional tutorials
- assist on moving wiki docs to more permanent tech docs on  
implementation of Blender features

With the BF receiving subsidy from the EU, we also have a budget for  
integrating Verse into Blender.

3) Verse integration
- connect to Verse server, allow some browsing/visualizing of its  
contents
- import/display indicated Verse data as (new type?) networked Mesh  
Object in Blender
- conversion of this object to static Mesh Object, or
- conversion of Mesh Objects to networked Verse object.

Most of us might know Nathan Letwory was hired part-time on above three  
issues, he already worked on Verse even, but due to illness he's most  
likely not available for the next months to finish the work. Especially  
on the Verse project I'm seeking for a replacement in the very short  
term.

People who are interested can best mail me personally! :)

Thanks,

-Ton-


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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org