For those who aren't familiar with the concept hinted at above by the Anonymous Monk, you might want to take a look at articles about the bystander effect. (and by extension, social loafing, diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic igorance).

Essentially, people in a group will be less likely to act, as they don't want to stand out, and will prefer to wait for someone else in the group to act. Anyone who's done work on a poorly managed project has probably seen this -- people become apathetic the goal of the project, (it might be that they don't want to be judged as sucking up, or they don't see why they should do more work than the others, but for whatever reason, without proper management, less work gets done).

The only way for a project to work is for there to be a clear delineation of responsibility -- every task needs to have a single person responsible for it, so that they don't think that someone else is going to do it, and they shouldn't bother. If the project team is only one person, that means that that one person does everything.

I've been involved in a couple of 'community projects', where too many people were taken on before we had a chance to get the framework set up -- it actually hinders the project, when you have to tell people 'no, we're not ready yet', because we didn't have the necessary infrastructure, and by the time that we did get the right stuff in place, they were disinterested because of the earlier stalling.

I'd recommend the same thing that the anonymous poster already said -- start the project, and set up the infrastructure. Identify what parts you're willing to cede control of, and that you can pass off to another person without going through a lengthy training period or otherwise need them to keep contacting you. (so you don't get the point where you wonder if it'd just be easier to do everything yourself, if you're going to have to watch over their shoulder, etc.) This isn't an overnight project... this could be a very useful project, but it's going to take more work than 'here's my idea...someone else go do it now', which I've seen other projects try.

In reply to Re^2: RFC: CPAN::Guides by jhourcle
in thread RFC: CPAN::Guides by simonm

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