Get him out of the way!

I am going to submit a grant application for *ABEL development. To justify the need for that, I did a lot of things -- in particular, I've analyzed the e-mails I was receiving and sending about *ABEL: you know, people are asking how you do this and that analyzes, and you reply.

I have discovered some figures which seemed impressive to me. The first CRAN release of GenABEL came out in Feb. 2007. In March, 2007, I got only few questions. At the moment, the number of e-mails I receive about *ABEL per month is about 200. In total, since the first CRAN release, I got about 3,000 e-mails about *ABEL. About half of them I had and did reply to.

Anyways. I drew the number of *ABEL mails per month -- see the graph  below

... and was puzzled about irregular pattern. So I tried to figure out what is going on -- and managed to identify the events (marked with red and green circles) which apparently were driving the pattern. I was very happy I could attribute a lot of variation to some factors :)

So, in this happy scientific state I dropped by Lennart's office to show the graph. See, it starts with few e-mail in March 2007, ... blah, blha, blah, ... the pattern ... But I managed to identify the critical events! So -- do you Lennart want to know what are the green dots -- what are the events which boost the number of e-mails up? Surely he did want to know. So I tell -- feeling myself as some prophet -- THESE ARE LAUNCHES OF NEW PRODUCTS. Around Jan 2009 (green upper  point #1) we launched ProbABEL. Around Jan. 2010 (green upper  point #2) we launched DatABEL and MixABEL development. Wow! -- was Lennart's reply; -- but what about the deeps -- the lower red points? It seems that there is some obstacle we got in the user support model he was saying. Apparently what happens is that a number of e-mails get unanswered, so the flow is broken. And what is funny, he continued, is that this obstacle got a kind of 6-months period -- it comes into play in June/July and December/January (see the figure). We need to figure that out and get that out of our way! -- he said.

Oh yes, tell I, feeling very smart. I have figured that factor out! These red dots apparently coincide with my vacations. So, you see, what is happening is that I get a number of e-mails, but if I am on vacations, they are not answered and are not discussed any... At this point I got suddenly interrupted by Lennart who shouted -- so YOU are the obstacle!.. We got to get you out of the way!

%&^$^$!!!!  (!)  &*#%(!!

... after all, I am a scientist. I am statistical geneticist. I do respect the numbers. So, thinking realistically, Lennart is totally right. What we need to do to solve the user support problem is to get me out of the *ABEL way. Now all project communications goes through me. And this is not right. There are many guys around who can answer the questions -- why not letting them answer directly? Moreover, as project is already quite big, there are many parts and questions where other guys can give a better answer then me! So, right, let's do that -- get Yurii out of the way!

What we think of doing is establishing totally different user support model. It used to be all-requests-go-through-Yurii model, now we gonna make that a community model. There are many guys around who are very expert and contributed a lot already. It is very happy that GenABEL already got a very large number of expert volunteers participating in the development. Current idea is that we will set up a mailing-list/forum/??? for user questions and for developers, so the information can flow freely. We will update the web-site and provide the mechanism for the people to join in and contribute to documentation and tutorials. Any suggestions are welcome!