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Re: How can functional people "really" participate in OCA?

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Re: How can functional people "really" participate in OCA?

by
Ygol InternetWork, Yves Goldberg
- 15/02/2020 19:55:05
My 2cents attempt to answer your questions:

  • Why is it desired from OCA, that functional people take part? What would be the benefits? Why would OCA value that?
I think that most people interested in odoo have to find answers to functional questions they have first.
Greater adoption of odoo is in the interest of OCA.
  • What are the expectations of OCA?
from our about page:
"Establish and support an Open Source and collaborative community for the development and promotion of the Odoo features and modules."
  • Is there a structure that welcomes functional people and makes their contributions valued?
Yes through raising GitHub issues but those discussions are still "owned" by technical people (PSC)
  • Could or should a structure be created that supports functionals or even takes them for granted or as a necessary part?
I believe it might be useful to have functional discussions "owned" and moderated by functional people.
For example, it could be nice to have somewhere user case discussed, proposed solution path and maybe some challenged proposed solutions.

  • Why do functional people wish to contribute? What are their expectations?

  • What prevents them? How can we find out? What happens / happened in the past to functional people who are /were interested in contributing to the community.
There isn't a place to discuss how to do implement, find answers to use cases. Discuss the usefulness of new features.
Raising a Github issue is usually handled by the PSC and centered around the coding challenges.
  • How can an integrating and welcoming culture be improved and how can that be measured?
Maybe list "use cases" and their answer in the form of a detailed solution path. and the option to challenge those solution paths?!
This could also cover the "user manual" as a starting discussion point per OCA offered module? that could be challenged, ideas of improvement, new functionalities.
Maybe a forum could be a useful tool. with answers voted as "best answer". The number of people participating would be a good measure of interest in the topic at hand.

Here's a concrete example:
 Q. user a needs to offer the prospect a website with a simulator and at his request, initiate a CRM pipeline process using the data used in the simulator.

A1: code a module with a form (controller + javascript).
A2: use and extend the "survey" module.
A3: integrate an existing javascript library.

Which one is better? what are +- for each solution?
Maybe a discussion about this will interest users with the same kind of needs. Maybe technical people will want to bring their idea about the topic
I think that discussion could take place off Github. (in a forum?!).

Anyway, hope this makes sense and is useful to someone here.
Good weekend everyone.


--
Yves Goldberg
--


----- Original message -----
From: "Bettina Pfeifer dygytally.de" <bettina@dygytally.de>
To: Contributors <contributors@odoo-community.org>
Subject: Re: How can functional people "really" participate in OCA?
Date: Saturday, February 15, 2020 19:57

Dear Kitti, dear community,

as a functional person I would like to add my 2ct in the discussion about this "pretty hard question :) " from Kitti.

First of all, this question really really needs to be discussed together with functional people. Some of you already pointed that out.

If tech people suggest what to change, this is a nice move, but keeps generating solutions from tech people.

Odoo has a (open or not so open) culture of "everything is in the sourcecode" and this is a rather difficult approach for functionals.

In my opinion it is most of all a question of culture, so we could first of all ask more detailed questions like these: 

  • Why is it desired from OCA, that functional people take part? What would be the benefits? Why would OCA value that?
  • What are the expectations from OCA?
  • Is there a structure that welcomes functional people and makes their contributions valued?
  • Could or should a structure be created that supports functionals or even takes them for granted or as a necessary part?
  • Why do functional people wish to contribute? What are their expectations?
  • What prevents them? How can we find out? What happens / happened in the past to functional people who are /were interested in contributing to the community.
  • How can an integrating and welcoming culture be improved and how can that be measured?

These questions can not be answered with tools. In my opinion, there needs to be an actively managed process to change more than tools.

Disclaimer: I am not a pure functional, I am also an experienced developer (outside of the python world) with solid database know how. Moving into a functional role as an Odoo Partner I hoped to escape the developer and tech world. Today, I do develop modules sometimes, use Github and look into the source code. (And have programmers to do more developments. ) Probably a lot of contributors are in a half tech and half functional role themselves. So it should not be too difficult to understand the pure functional world.

The fog in the forest picture from Landis made me smile and now, finally, I send this mail, which I had in my Draft folder for a while.

Kind regards, Bettina

--

Am 05.02.20 um 20:46 schrieb Kitti Upariphutthiphong:

Dear community,

I have a pretty hard question :)

We always say that functional people  is vital to ERP system, for sure in the project. But are functional people have places in OCA?

Are there forum or any place where functional can fully contribute their business knowledge without friction of tech, github and programmer languages?

Any pure functional people in OCA can help answer this? :)
Thanks!

Note: This question is passed here by my functional peer who want to participate in OCA. But I also don't have that good suggestion too.

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