Hi!
Do you enjoy doing animations with Synfig Studio?
We are happy to know about it.
But those people who conform that “we”, are having less and less free time over the time…
We need your contribution!!
Please let me briefly explain the areas where we need urgently your help:
- Translations: Transifex is a quite good tool to handle on line translations but it doesn’t do all the job. It helps not expert people to be able to translate strings and offer them to the project. But the translated files needs some operations to make them able to be incorporated to Synfig code. Unfortunately the provided files (po files) needs correction on the header of the file to adapt it to the Synfig project description, copyrights years of translators, language teams etc. That’s a time consuming work that has to be done every time a new translation update is done. Also someone has to prevent updating of translations and take care of the templates updates.
- Releases: Once the code is ready and the binaries and tarballs uploaded to sourceforge, it is needed to make a good press release post on the website blog, and make that new release known on the blogs, magazines and corresponding social networks.
All the time that “we” dedicate to those tasks, “we” don’t dedicate our (small) free time to code, fix bugs, maintain the website infrastructure, update the wiki or support the forums.
Sometimes I feel that I’m not having fun contributing to Synfig Project, and that’s not good… It is possible to be on that status momentarily when you take care of something that is needed to do for the success of a community project. If you see people around working with you and there is needed to do that boring task, that will complete the work of many, anyone of us happily would carry on that not so fun boring task…
But when you see that amount of people contributing to project is getting less and less each time, when you see that the enthusiasm on those who receive the result of the team work, doesn’t feed back with suggestions, complains, hurrays or just doing animations with it, it is harder by day to complete those works that are needed to do but that are boring and time consuming.
May be it is my fault because I don’t transmit so much enthusiasm lately (and so there is not enthusiasm return). Maybe it is my fault due to fault of knowledge. Maybe it is my fault on do not transmit the needed help. But the fact is that lately I only have some fun when coding Synfig. All the rest looks to me like an obligation. And that feeling is inverse to the amount of fun when doing it.
I know that I’m not obligated to be here, I’m not obligated to supposedly carry on the torch of the leading of the project, but hey, one turn from time to time doesn’t hurts!
I’ve lived similar situations when I were like you, on the passive side and others were like me, on the active side. I have seen people leaving the project with no way to return anymore. I’ve seen also coders being extinguished due to the lack of excitation on developing code… I don’t want to end like them. I would like to get a breath, let the wheel run during the breath period and come back with renewed forces to spin the wheel more even. What I don’t want to do is to take that breath and see how the wheel stops. It is absolutely harder to make start the wheel running than to keep it.
I guess that it is the curse of the open projects. Below a critical mass the project can collapse.
Would we allow that?
-G
Edit BobSynfig: Changed Transifex project location
Have you pushed?
