[CCC DEV] Repository question

[Carl Ritson]

> We would like to propose moving the KRoC repository to a space that
> makes it easier to discover the project, and makes it easy for new
> contributors to join and collaborate with us.

Executive summary:.
I'm not against a move, although I don't see myself actively
contributing in the future anyway, but there are a few things that
would need to be resolved.

> 1) Project Discovery
> Projects hosted at sites like Github or Bitbucket are easily
> discovered by search engines, and are well understood in the open
> source world to mean "please participate."

I don't think that moving the repository will increase project
discoverability.  Search engines are pretty good at listing specific
things anyway, if you want higher discoverability it really is a
matter of having a good and updated website and raising community
awareness (in my opinion).

I do think it helps with the second part of "please participate".  So
I guess the idea of the exercise is to increase the number of
contributors, not the number of users?

> 2) New Contributors
> Currently, we must take an active role in approving new
> contributors---editing permissions, creating branches, etc.
> Distributed version control systems on public sites allow anyone to
> fork, edit, and request a merge without our intervention. This would
> be particularly excellent for supporting student projects.

Yes, this is pretty much the second part of (1).

> 3) Collaboration
> We would like to continue developing opportunities for people to
> explore occam-pi on a variety of platforms (Arduino, etc.). Currently,
> growing our community is difficult.

Again this is really just the second part of (1), where the repository
is just one aspect of what's required to grow the community.

My experience of GitHub has been good to date, and I do believe it
provides a means toward easier (and perhaps more casual) involvement.
Particularly forks of a given project are easily discovered and
explored.

So my logistical questions are:
 * Who will create/hold the KRoC account on whichever service (and
presumably do the initial import)?
 * What about the private sources in the KRoC repository, leave these
on projects.cs.kent.ac.uk?
 * What about the (small) set of content on the Trac instance?

Cheers,

Carl