[holger_marschall]

Hi Sylvester,
Hi David,

I am the administrator of the Extend Community Portal.

You are indeed making a valid point. However, my view is a bit more differentiated: It is my strong belief that development must be as transparent as possible AND that freedom must be provided to developers to the greatest extend possible. The ultimate goal of providing infrastructure (a content management system in this case: forum, project management, etc.) for the project is to stimulate developments. This **must** be provided both free (of costs) and free (in the sense of freedom).

This said, there are surely many possibilities to approach this goal. The Extend Community Portal provides some; the members are free to choose among different options:

1. Groups
   There is the option to create Special Interest Groups, Local User Groups and Working Groups. The third 'type', a working group would be about working on a specific issue using OpenFOAM technology. A group forum (that is automatically created) is open and transparent. All forums are searchable.
2. Project
   This is additional functionality providing the possbility to manage a project (file sharing, task and time management, etc.). A project can be created as closed or open project. Eventually that is up to the founder.

Sylvester, I think, it's really fair to say that with code being in a very early stage (definitely far from a release), people should be allowed to organize their work on their code using free and open accessible infrastructure as provided by Extend. If this is organised around open or closed projects is up to the users and would happen anyway. I would surely like to see that developers **always** create a 'working group' when starting a project on the portal, where they announce that they have started to work on a specific topic, so people can ask questions or ask how to join. Then, the next step would be to do a wall post on the corresponding SIG site being close to the working area. In the past, one would not even been aware of anything going on, because people are sharing e-mails . So the portal is putting together many functions to get informations organized **at place** and to provide the possibility to contact the members of a group that are currently active in the respective field.

David, thanks for your input. You are completely right. The CMS this site is build around is a modular one (diffent layout per functionality). One surely must take some time to get into it and I do appreciate any **concrete** hint how to improve structure. For this, please report your suggestions to the bug report system (Mantis) of Extend. It's like the documentation... let's improve it in a collaborative manner!

best regards,
Holger