[Numpy-discussion] Numpy governance update

[Paul Anton Letnes]

> 
> An example I really like is LibreOffice's "get involved" page.
> 
> http://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/
> 
> Producing something similar for NumPy will take some work, but I believe it's needed.

Speaking as someone who has contributed to numpy in a microscopic fashion, I agree completely. I spent quite a few hours digging through the webpages, asking for help on the mailing list, reading the Trac, reading git tutorials etc. before I managed to do something remotely useful. In general, I think the webpage for numpy (and scipy, but let's not discuss that here) would benefit from some refurbishing, including the documentation pages. As an example, one of the links on the webpage is "Numpy for MATLAB users". I never used matlab much, so this is completely irrelevant for me.

I think there should be a discussion about what goes on the front page, and it should be as little as possible, but not less than that. Make it easy for people to
1) start using numpy
2) reading detailed documentation
3) reporting bugs
4) contributing to numpy
because those are the fundamental things a user/developer wants from an open source project. Right now there's Trac, github, numpy.scipy.org, http://docs.scipy.org/doc/, the mailing list, and someone mentioned a google group discussing something or other. It took me years to figure out how things are patched together, and I'm still not sure exactly who reads the Trac discussion, github discussion, and mailing list discussions.

tl;dr: Numpy is awesome (TM) but needs a more coherent online presence, and one that makes it easy to contribute back to the project.

Thanks for making numpy awesome!

Paul