Continuation of a conversation that occurred during a Dev-Chat meeting held on March 26, 2025

[emaralive]

The following comes from a Dev-chat meeting held on March 26, 2025 which appears to be a summatio of what had transpired that was provided by @dcavins. My viewpoint is that we should continue this conversation.

Note

The original list were bulleted items and for this discussion they were changed to numbers such they can be references as item x and so forth (shorthand notation) when discussing a specific item.

Definitely! It was an interesting conversation you all had today, and these are the main points I took away:

1. We don’t have enough help
2. We should try to work for the end users (BUT! Don’t get hung up on features alone--you can’t build some features on old, shaky foundations so sometimes you have to do unsexy work)
3. We should try to build releases that are somewhat focused (this was the old way, where all of the devs would try to come up with tasks they were interested in that would contribute to the overall goal of the release)
4. We need to figure out what people actually want (we used to do surveys, but honestly I’m not sure they were super helpful)
5. We need to resolve some issues that people are facing, if we can understand the issues.

[emaralive]

I'll go first, seems to me, item 1 will solve itself over time whereby there will be ebb ad flow due the dynamics in play. Meaning, as a backstory, I got involved with the development of BuddyPress a couple of years ago (around October of 2023) when, IIRC, beta3 of version 12 was in play. At that time there were only 2 individuals who were participating, of which I observed and decided that additional help might be welcomed and I allocated some time for this purpose.

Over time, the active "team" grew to 5 individuals and then shrank back to 3 active individuals within roughly a years time, from when I started getting involved. That said, we do what we can with what we have and try to work smarter, e.g., automate tasks when appropriate to save time, etc, etc.

There seems to be some interest in development work, by those who are basically lurking but will post reactions, indicating an interest, but, we aren't having those meeting, on a regular basis, that may spark interest. Some times we are our own worst enemies, for a variety of reasons or perspectives. Anyone can run a Dev-Chat meeting, the drudgery is, probably, setting and posting:

• Agenda items
• Meeting notes

My observation, when auditing some WP meetings is that they, not in all cases, ask if someone wants to facilitate a future meeting, usually the next meeting and whether someone will volunteer to take notes for the current meeting. Some of the WP meetings fail to occur, notwithstanding published meeting schedules, again due to a variety of reasons.

Anyone interested in furthering this item is welcome to do so or pick another item to further the conversation.