And how do you maintain momentum, direction and growth in a large project that has an enormous potential audience?  It's a big job, and Shaun's idea of sub-projects for a trial period to gauge success will be the start of some very big things in my opinion.

It's easy to say - hey you're core team member so you get the extra goodies, insight, bonuses, whatever, and for some I think they don't pull their weight at all, but for those who are committed to pushing DotNetNuke forward, the concept of sub projects, give responsibility to a core team member, to handle one single part of the project and work with non core team members is excellent.  There is alot of work and responsibility I've found.. often the hard way with good intentions and ideas that I couldn't maintain due to the size of project, and see that by being able to participate in areas that of interest and an area that I feel I can manage / work with in a capacity that I'm comfortable with is terrific.

I haven't seen all the documentation involved in the sub projects, just the first ideas and they are exciting to say the least.  My initial ideas of making the core team bigger than the sun with everyone involved seems to have jaded over the last few months as I see the hard facts that even with 40 or so core team members, I have no idea what half of them do, have never seen them post in forum,  wonder what their contribution is and feel for those in the core team who have worked hard at making a difference. 

It really does go beyond any glamour that I can tell you, but never for one moment can I honestly say that I regret the time I've spent doing core team work, or building my site, or getting those free skins done, or helping where possible. We are on deadlines that I sometimes find hard to manage, because I'm not able to work as fast as some others, but I guess may be more persistent enough, or have a better support environment around me personally to try and work things out.  Jeremy White ended up doing the skinning docs updates and I can see why - he had access to information that was just beyond me for now, but fortunately I was able to make some extra additions which I think are important from a non tech point of view and am busy getting them ready for articles and such.

Back to the sub project topic - This opens the door to so many people who felt they would like to help somewhere, but not sure where, and there are an unbelievably talented amound of people around who aren't on the core team, but now can participate and my understanding is they will get recognition.  This is still to be finalised, and I'm not going to steal Shaun's thunder, but simply let people know that wow, there are some changes coming around.

Pity I can't code, as that leaves me unable to participate in any particular module, but I'd like to think I can work more in the documentation, UI, standards, consistency, information as we push DotNetNuke even further.

What's also inspiring is that no matter what I do in a day, there's not been a single 24 hours that's gone by in the last 12 months in particular that hasn't made me stop and think - Damn.. DotNetNuke just rocks...

For me, it's been hard to stablise and get reorganised again and finish off some neglected areas that I felt occured on my quest for the bigger picture, but most, actually, all people I've had the pleasure dealing with of late have been very understanding, and respect the time that has been put in for their product/project/new business/ application - called DotNetNuke. 

Now it's time for me to get back to getting things on track, working hard on getting the store / resource site done, but had some problems with modules not installed correctly - so rather than spend hours fixing, will rebuild that instance and see how I go.  Maybe I installed modules when I was tired.. who knows.

So there you have it, some interesting information on what's happening in the world of DotNetNuke from a non coder's perspective and I hope you all enjoy and get something out of the blogs - I do enjoy writing and sometimes find that time has slipped by quickly without me knowing.

Also, containers.. 18 of them .. should beonline tomorrow - all seems to be going to plan! Kirsty is doing a wonderful job ... would be lost without her!

Nina Meiers