As part of our effort to transition to a volunteer-driven project, we are establishing a User Advisory Group that will take on a broad range of responsibilities including:

1. USER SUPPORT

Responding to user questions and keeping end-user documentation up to date and accessible (e.g. Product Tour, Get Started Guide, Troubleshooting page, FAQ)

• Blogging ideas: User question of the week. Feature: User hack. User profiles.

2. MAINTAINING FOCUS AND DIRECTION

Processing user feedback and keeping the Desktop and Server work queues up to date with the most urgent bug fixes and most requested feature work. 

Helping volunteer developers identify projects to work on that will have the greatest user impact.

Open Issue: What do we do with the 1.0-Candidates list?

(With volunteer developers, users can't mandate that certain bugs and features get worked on, but maintaining up to date priority lists certainly increases the changes that the most crucial issues will get attention!)

3. TESTING

Organizing the user community to help test bug fixes and new features as well as providing user feedback on design issues before a patch is accepted.

• e.g. Nominating patches for user review of trading videos .
• e.g. Nominating patches for a release. (Do users have the final say on what goes in a release?)

4. COMMUNITY BUILDING

• Recruiting!
• e.g. Posting to the blog when there are interesting user discussions (e.g. User Hacks blog series.)
• e.g. Sending out user surveys to more proactively gather information about Chandler's user base. Who's using it, in what contexts, for what reasons. What's working, what's not, etc.

5. ADVISING THE BOARD

On issues relevant to the user community such as:

• e.g. Prioritizing Bug fixes and New Feature work if funds are available for paid development.
• e.g. Ways to build the user base and strengthen the user community such as identifying user demographics Chandler should consider targeting with evangelism efforts.

6. INFORMING THE RE-ARCHITECTURE EFFORT

In the near-term I imagine there will also be a lot of work to help us prioritize work on the re-architecture project. e.g. Collecting top 10 list of usability issues we want to make sure we get right on the re-architecture!

In the coming weeks and months we will be working out roles and responsibilities as well as decision-making processes. Our discussions will be public and open to input from the community.

PROJECTS

Some early thoughts on projects for the advisory board include:

• Looking for potential models in other open source projects.
• Filling out a more comprehensive "Chandler Basics" user guide.
• Setting up and hosting a Chandler Users web forums

Process-oriented projects include:

• Working out a process for nominating and prioritizing bugs and feature requests
• Working out a process for nominating patches for user reviews / releases.
• Working out a process for nominating and adding new members to the User Advisory Group
  • Are there term limits? Maximum #? Always maintain an odd-numbered group?
  • Do members of the UAG have commit rights? What does that mean?