Successful transitions

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm William Billingsley, a computing and HCI researcher and engineer, and I am one of the developers who has temporarily taken over development of Talks.cam, at least over the next couple of months. However, rather than just say "hello world", I thought it would be worth saying something about the transitioning process.

Many famous open source projects are centered around a charismatic individual, be it Linus Torvalds for Linux or Martin Dougiamas for Moodle. Rod Johnson, "the father of the Spring framework", even has his own action figure. For Talks.cam, of course, our charismatic original developer (Tom Counsell) moved on from Cambridge some time ago. So, we have to think carefully about how to ensure the vision, motivation, and technical development of the project survives each transition of development staff. We can't just rely on the drive and fame of a benevolent dictator to bind us together.

We have a very good starting point, in that we have a steering group that includes many people who have been attached to the project from the beginning, just not in development. And from a financial perspective, we have JISC's support in the EGRET project to improve and transform the system. However, there are also subtler factors we need to bear in mind. Each time someone new takes over lead development for the project, there is a learning overhead. Not just what the project is about and the language it is written in, but also fiddlier details such as how the system differs from other Ruby on Rails applications. For instance, since Talks.cam was written, the Rails platform has moved on a few versions, and newer versions of Rails do by default some things that had to be coded into Talks.cam by hand. For a single developer, there is very little point stripping out working code just in order to "be more standard", but for transitioning developers it can help to reduce the learning burden. The further from the norm Talks gets, the harder it would be for a new developer to learn -- and that's true even if its "the norm" that has been moving!

No doubt there will be other issues we need to deal with, and I'll probably mention them here as they come up. We want to ensure that, like Taggart or Doctor Who, while the faces may change, the show will go on.