[Nottingham] FLOSS Project Planners

[James Moore]

On 19/03/2012 00:53, Richard Smedley wrote:
> On 16/03/12 16:42, Martin wrote:
>> Anyone tried any FLOSS project planners?
>>
>> Linux Format ran a recent article on them which shows quite a poor
>> picture for what seems to be available. Do geeks really not need to plan
>> anything?! :-(
>>
>> So, any recommendations?
>>
>> Are there any "CMS"-like LAMP (web) applications that include project
>> planning?
>>
>>
>> (Or is MS-Project the only option? :-( )
>
>
> How useful they are depends upon your Project Management methdology
> (e.g. for PRINCE2 you might be best customising Plone, as you'll
> have a lot of paperwork to deal with!).
>
> I've had some success with Feng Office [1] and liked Chandler [2]
> when I tried it some time ago.
>
> Other than that, ad hoc use of wikis works well or, if everyone
> involved is okay with outlining mode, I work from org-mode [3]
> (on Emacs or Android) and send folded text [4] back and forth 
> (versioned) to ppl who may be using something else (it imports
> and exports its outline text to HTML, mindmaps, and much else).
>
> While I suspect the last solution may not be everyone's cup of tea,
> the real point is that everyone has different requirements, and
> it depends on what scale of project you want to manage :-)
>
>  - Richard
>
>
> [1] 
> <http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/tutorials/online-collaboration-with-feng-office/>
> (in the magazine this was 24 screenshots with captions - the online 
> version doesn't make as much sense)
> http://fengoffice.com/web/index.php
>
> [2]
> <http://chandlerproject.org/vision#Processing,%20Organizing%20and%20Manag> 
>
> <http://chandlerproject.org/faq#*Q*%20Does%20Chandler%20do%20project%20man> 
>
>
> [3]
> http://orgmode.org/
> http://blog.modelworks.ch/?p=129
> http://orgmode.org/worg/index.html
> <http://www.quora.com/Can-org-mode-be-used-effectively-as-a-project-management-tool> 
>
> <http://sachachua.com/blog/2009/04/nothing-quite-like-org-for-emacs/>
>
> <http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/tutorials/emacs-in-the-real-world-part-2/>
>
>
> [4] <http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/index.html>
>
>
>
>
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I don't know anything about the code behind it except that the base 
protocol for chat is IRC, but I wonder if any of you remember Dr. Tromp 
introducing around to the group around 2003, the idea of an immersive 
collaborative environment? I speak specifically of Second Life; her 
project involved a custom island called Bluepill which as far as I know 
still exists and is still in use by her (occasionally) and others, 
mainly as a technology demonstration but occasionally in live 
collaborations. The advantage to a system like this is that updates are 
live and instant, and everybody's looking at the same thing - because 
the client terminal is just there to display and interact on a realtime 
basis with what's in the VEn, which runs continuously and discretely on 
the server.

Incidentally, I have (somewhere) her PhD thesis and a lot of notes we 
put together on collaborative virtual environments, with some blueprints 
of a distributed database and management system (and a pseudofilesystem 
based on it which is more an overlay) on which to base such an 
environment that we did a lot of napkin math on over several beers... oh 
yeah, and the dDBMS/DBFS works (I've deployed it on a small scale at 
home!) I haven't done anything on this in a few years, maybe time to 
resurrect?