[Babase] A proposed Babase announcment

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Wed Feb 20 15:44:08 EST 2008


On 02/20/2008 02:08:00 PM, Susan Alberts wrote:

> 
> OK thanks for clarifying. At the moment I can't imagine that I can  
> field any more emails, so perhaps better not to invite any. I don't  
> want to see any database schema design critiques.
> 
>> I imagine I'll get emails, eventually, no matter what.  My name
>> and email address is all over the code and will be
>> the From address of the announcement.
> 
> Good point. Presumably and hopefully these will be low volume and  
> will happen no matter whether we ask for volunteer code contributions  
> or not. At the moment I am inclined towards not inviting any  
> volunteer contributions. When you do get emails, would you bill us  
> for that time or would that be on your time? As you can imagine, this  
> question has become more pressing recently. If you felt you would  
> have to bill us (which I would understand) then I think we would need  
> to explicitly say that we most likely can not respond to email  
> inquiries except in a very limited way.

Because it's me throwing the code out there and
my posting the announcement that I can't legitimately
bill Babase for the time.  At the same time, I don't
necessarily want (or at any given moment have the time
for) to be the Babase spokesperson.  I'm entirely
willing to get technical emails of all sorts,
and have an inborn reluctance to being ignorant
of ongoing events, but I was thinking along the
lines of having Tabby or Lacey be the official first point
of contact and do triage.

I'm probably over-thinking because I don't really
expect anyone to be interested.  (Maybe you could
write Beth and ask her to express an interest
so my feelings aren't hurt?)

I guess there are several issues.  The first is whether
Babase should have a contact person.  We could
certainly leave it up to people who want to reach
the project to sift through our websites and dig up
someone's email address.

The second is whether we should invite volunteers
to participate in the coding or anything else.
I don't know whether such help would be useful,
and I don't think we'll really know until somebody
volunteers to do something.  But we can't actually
ask for participation without giving out
a contact address.

I would like to encourage others to use the code,
or the design, or whatever bits and pieces are
useful.  It was nice to find that (IIRC) the
Goodall Institute was using the original Babase
design.

Anyway I'm happy to field the technical stuff for free.
If it ever becomes burdensome I'll change my mind
and we can figure out what to do then.

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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