Listen to DoctorMO.Support the Dohickey Project. Support the Ubuntu Hardware Database

[wersdaluv]

I was kinda shocked when I saw this Ubuntu Brainstorm idea (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/40/). It seems that nobody's paying attention to DoctorMO's Dohickey Project. I mean, he's making his project visible but not enough attention is paid to him. Maybe, it's just because the people who need it still don't know about it?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=693414&highlight=doctormo+dohickey

http://dohickey.parsed.net/

[DoctorMO]

Thanks wersdaluv :-) I think the problem is the split in ubuntu user community. In the old days (some say the bad old days) you could go to any user community and find a plethera of programmers, sys admins or just techno junkies.

This isn't this community and for good reasons too.

But the people who are programmers, sys-admins and techno junkies won't touch the ubuntu community, even the ones that work _on_ ubuntu don't visit these forums with any regularity.

The end result is that I could plead with the ubuntu forums community as much as I like but people wouldn't do anything or help, mostly because they can't or at least _think_ they can't which is why I've been trying to make Dohickey so easy to use for the average person. Going to great lengths to allow people to put hardware data in.

Now it's not a finished project so I can understand a lot of the criticism that an unstable base isn't one worth building on yet. But the use would help fix bugs and the extra eyes are worth it. File bug reports in launchpad, it's on there too.

Hopefully though we can let all the technical people know that I need help and some of them can spend a little time helping our project out.

[DoctorMO]

This is a bump because I think more people should read about the trials of trying to develop software for ubuntu without community help.

[p_quarles]

This is a bump because I think more people should read about the trials of trying to develop software for ubuntu without community help.
I think one point that needs to be made here is that it is not easy to come by a clear description of the relevance of this project. From what I can glean, this is a project which aims to create a large database of hardware compatibility information for use by GNU/Linux developers. That's a fantastic idea, and I applaud the effort.

But (yes, there's a but), here's what I see when I click on wersdaluv's links:

Hello Ubuntu folks,

OK I've finally decided to release 0.7, I should have done this a long
time ago and broke the "release early, release often" philosophy but here it is! a new release:

Download: www.dohickey-project.com/client/download.shtml (http://www.dohickey-project.com/client/download.shtml)
ChangeLog: https://sourceforge.net/project/show...ease_id=575534 (https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=575534)

This release comes with a couple of exciting elements, the cpu and ram
items add extra bulk to the hardware view. The view modes allow for
you to specify what ever mode you feel most comfortable working in.
And the drivers section will now tell you what kind of drivers are
being used by that device.That's the first few paragraphs from your announcement of the project.

The front page of the site:

Dohickey
Interactive Device DatabaseFollowed by a search field and several links.

When I click "About us", I get this:

Dohickey is a client/server project for managing hardware information. Using built-in Ubuntu services to detect the hardware in your system it will make a request to the server for any available information about each piece of hardware. If something is not defined yet but you know what it is the client allows you to edit the information and send it back to the server. Each piece of hardware also has a compatibility rating, this is an average value of all rating values given by other users for this hardware, you can set your own rating for each piece of hardware which will also be sent back to the server for others to utilise.At this point, I know a little bit about what it does, but still nothing about why I should use it or how it helps Ubuntu development.

Basically, I think that the presentation of this project needs to be improved. If community participation in this project is a way to help Ubuntu development, I think many people here would jump at the opportunity to do something. But the fact that this is a way of helping needs to be made obvious.

There is a lot to read here, and most people (in any situation) tend to sift through things by skimming for items that catch their attention, and then reading more closely when something does.

Shorter version: emphasize what this does and how it helps. To your average prospective participant, this matters a great deal more than what has changed from the last version, or how the database is constructed.

[DoctorMO]

p_quarles, sounds like you know what your talking about; it's not always the case that a programmer can be a good rep too so I ask you if you would help me in this regard? You know about the project and you seem to know what kind of things needs to be changed so It would be really helpful if you could do some writing for us.

[p_quarles]

I'm happy to give it a shot. If you'll PM me with all the relevant details you have, and any thoughts on what kind of message you want to get across, I'm happy to draft out a release announcement template and some suggested revisions to the project page.

[DoctorMO]

Thanks p_quarles, I've sent the info.