A few comments from my side, may I? :)
Glad to read I am not the only who would like the Automattic team just to tell us more what they are doing.
They CAN do this if they want. But they are not OBLIGED to.
As MrBrian mentioned above 'they have been great about sharing some of their code and spurring the project with donncha at the helm'.
I fully agree.
One thing though - Trac is more 'wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects', not really a project management system.
A question to community - what would you want to have as project management system? I mean, what except Trac (bug/issues tracking) would you like to see in project management system? Or maybe is anything besides Trac not really needed? Just curious to hear opinions.
For me, it meant that you guies had a precise idea where you were going, you would make sure that everything is compatible and is developed in a synchronized way and... would move fast.
If you have 3 kids, can you expect that they study in school 'synchronized and fast' (in the same manner) because all three are yours? :) I guess, no.
Each kid is individual, so each project is.
- it is impossible to have any deadline for the development (like in a day ? a week ? a month ?)
This is really almost impossible, even when it comes to commercial projects. If you ever did any project management you should be aware of this.
Here we have a 'free' project, maintained by people in their free time - means *when* they can do it and *if* they're willing to.
- it is impossible to have some centralized information for bbPress, BuddyPress and Wordpress Mu... Do you really need 3 websites ???
These are 3 separate projects. Why would someone want to plunk them all into one website?
- and whereas everyone is waiting for you to release stable versions (or at least up to date for wordpress mu), Wordpress Mu is more than two months late compared to wordpress, bbPress is still in 0.9 but if you want to use it with buddypress you have to use the beta version (first time I ever see that...) and for buddypress, the theme skeleton should be used with the SVN version...
So what? :)
Well, if you've got a few 100's thousand bucks to spend I'm ready to gather a team and make WPMU 'synchronized' with WP, release 1.0 stable of bbPress and BuddyPress.
If you don't - ooops, sorry ;)
Please, start coordinating, start planning, start communicating with the community, and start having some common sense.
You'd better not mention common sense here.
What pertains other things in your statement - go ahead and suggest a scheme of 'coordinating, planning and communicating with the community'. I'd be the first one to read such a suggestion.
What every project should have:
- clear goals (and not a long TODO list what someone may do some day...)
Got a few such 'goals' to drop in?
- clear deadlines (like ubuntu...)\
Will this really help you? How?
- clear communication with the public (and not three websites with no info)
Commented on this above.
- some common sense (do not propose to download things which can not be used with the stable version available...)
Is offering to download and test BETAs beyond common sense?
And one more thing.
I just try to understand the Automattic business system.
Why do you need to understand Automattic's business system? In any case, asking someone about the business system he uses doesn't usually lead to direct answers. This means you should analyze this yourself (if you really need).
Just my 2 cents...
P.S. Did not mean troll on someone/something or offend anyone here, so, please, don't take my post as something like this.