BeeSeek Blog

BeeSeek recently changed it's teams' structure and you can see a big effect on its "structure" on Launchpad.
Now every part of BeeSeek is an indipendent project and has separated Launchpad homepage, bug-reporting page, blueprints' page, etc.

We had the opportunity to interview Andrea Colangelo (aka warp10) on our IRC channel, #beeseek on irc.freenode.net , to know more about all that stuff. Andrea is the BeeSeek Community Manager and the main promoter of these changes; here is what he told to our "cameras"...

Churli: What is about the teams' reorganization?

warp10: More than reorganizing the teams I would speak about a reorganization of the project in its entirety. To facilitate the contribution in the various components that make up our project, we decided to define precisely the use of the instruments Launchpad make us available, as bug reports and blueprints, for example.

warp10: In this way all the tasks that must be carried out (such as bugs to be resolved and/or new features to be introduced) are on Launchpad, each reported to linked project (eg: hive, the website, drupal, etc...). Who wants to work one of these tasks just has to set it for himself in Launchpad and can begin to work independently, obviously with the help of the whole community if necessary.

Churli: Is not that all this tangle on Launchpad can bring the project to a greater dispersion?

warp10: I really don't think so. Launchpad is a very powerful tool that allows you to create associations between bugs and blueprints and even between different projects, for example when it happens that a bug involving multiple components (for example the blog, the planet and the site together). In addition, its interface is very simple and efficient. The fact that an entire distribution as Ubuntu is produced and managed entirely on Launchpad in all its components, from bug reports to translations, reassures us considerably on the goodness and efficiency of our choice.

warp10: Take for example the bug report, which we use widely. It is possible to scroll through the list of bugs per project, through tags, selecting them for importance or state of progress. Each member of the community and each team can join or assign himself to the bug, and by his personal page is easy to identify bugs that are working. In conclusion, I don't see anything about the risk of being lost in the sea of information that Launchpad offers users, it's just to become a little familiar with its tools and use them efficiently :)

Churli: It was also proposed to use Launchpad teams' membership to manage users' privileges also on other instruments (eg: the Noticeboard).

Churli: What are the ideas about it and how is it going with their eventual implementation?

warp10: The ideas in this regard are many, and I am among the main proponents of this feature.

warp10: Launchpad provides rdf feeds that contain all the data referring to a project or a team. To parse this data is very easy, and this opens for us a wide spectrum of opportunity. For example, I'd love to see a system of automatic authentication on our website (which thanks to the awesome work of jak-o is now based on such a powerful CMS as Drupal), so that to everyone who joined our projects on Launchpad would automatically receive his privileges on Drupal according to the team which it participates.

warp10: For example, bloggers would automatically receive editors' privileges on the blog, wiki's members on the wiki, or, as you mentioned before, all beeseekers have access to the noticeboard and so forth. This opens interesting synergy opportunities and simplifies a lot the administrative work, since each new member acquires "automagically" its privileges.

warp10: In addition, it will be very interesting to implement OpenID in BeeSeek. Launchpad is a provider of the OpenID service, and this feature would make the work much easier. This project has not been started yet, we are still studying about it, but I hope it becomes a reality as soon as possible, I am convinced that it would be a good news for us.