On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 12:25:30 -0800, Robert Ramey wrote
There are a couple of reasons a wiki page might not be the best choice.
a) too easily hackable b) I very much like the idea of getting some rough statistics. e.g. how many people use library x. This presume data with some sort of simple structure.
Here's a couple thoughts. First off, the need for this was brought up at OOPSLA. People really like to see a list of users when evaluating if they are going to use a new open source tool. This is a very common feature of open source projects. So I think we really need to find a way to do this. As an example: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE-users.html As for how to gather the information, I think there needs to be 2 phases. Phase 1 would be a 'logo like' campaign to gather up current users. We can use the wiki/mail list and whatever tools we have available to gather the information. Publish a request on comp.lang.c++, etc. From this, I'll volunteer to collate the list and create a fixed web page we can incorporate into the main Boost web site. Phase 2 would be to come up with a way to maintain this. We could use a wiki page or perhaps a small web form to gather up information. This might be a simple php script that takes the information and updates the wiki or sends me email to add the information to the site. Periodically we would gather these up and add them in. Actually now that I've written it, it seems like designing the form should be the first step... Jeff