The Growstuff Project

Yipe, it's been a while since I posted an update here. Apologies. I've put it on a todo list so I'll remember to do it more often in future. In the meantime, if you want to keep up with the day-to-day workings of the project, once again I will remind you about our mailing list, which you can subscribe to at http://lists.growstuff.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss. It'll send a confirmation message to make sure you want to subscribe. Some people have found this ends up in a spam folder (especially on GMail) so if you think you subscribed but aren't getting anything, check there.

Anyway, news!

We are now starting iteration 4. We've switched to Pivotal Tracker for our project tracking, and you can see what we're working on at http://tracker.growstuff.org/ We're also recruiting developers for this iteration, so if you want to work on code and stuff (and yes, we'll teach you!) you can find the details here: http://lists.growstuff.org/pipermail/discuss/2012-November/000469.html

If you'd like to see what we've done so far, our dev website is up and running at http://dev.growstuff.org/ You can actually sign up for an account if you are so inclined, but be warned it is very sketchy at present and doesn't do much. That will change soon!

If you want to point people at a site for general information about the project, we've recently changed http://growstuff.org/ to point to our wiki, which has an increasing amount of information about the project. Please spread that link far and wide!

We've also decided to run weekly gatherings on IRC for everyone to get together and talk about the project and generally get to know each other. They're not compulsory or anything, but since IRC presence tends to be a bit intermittent and timezone-dependent, it seemed like a good idea to have one time in the week when more or us will make an effort to be there at the same time. Details here: http://lists.growstuff.org/pipermail/discuss/2012-November/000468.html

Finally, there's been some discussion about the terminology we want to use for people who use the Growstuff website. You can see a mailing list thread about it here: http://lists.growstuff.org/pipermail/discuss/2012-November/000470.html (click "next message" a few times to see the whole thread, or go up to http://lists.growstuff.org/pipermail/discuss/2012-November/thread.html to browse via the thread index). In short, the following terms have been vetoed:

* "users" (has a slightly dismissive/negative feel to it, also technical conflict with underlying software)
* "customers" (too corporate smarmy)
* "people" (doesn't allow for accounts held by groups/orgs/etc)

The current preferred suggestions are:

* "members"
* "growers"
* "gardeners"

This terminology would be used in our URL structure, for instance /whatever/ would point to a page where you can search for people using the site and see who's recently joined or active or whatever, and each account would have a page /whatever/name, eg. /members/Skud or /growers/Skud or /gardeners/Skud.

So, quick poll!



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