Last night on the LITG year in review, Ron said something along the lines of ‘Dear Santa, I would like the Redmen to win the Mann Cup this year’. While I don’t think that is quite in the cards (as much as I would like it to be; the Mann Cup finals are at the Ontario team this year), here is my wishlist for Selenium. All of which I think could happen.

  • Selenium 2.0 – There is an impressive amount of commits happening on the Selenium 2 subversion branch. I truly hope that 2.0 gets finished in calender year 2010 and doesn’t drag on perpetually in some weird 1.97.123 state.
  • Steering Committee – In this post I suggested that there needs to be a central body who steers Selenium. I still believe that. Perhaps more than ever now that people who have / are leading the project now have commercial interests now. Not to mention the number of secondary projects that consume Selenium that need / should have a voice as well. I think the model for this might be Apache, but I haven’t looked too hard recently at its governance model
  • Clear up Component Owners – There are a lot of moving Parts in Selenium. Not only do you have the core components (Core, IDE, RC, Grid), these each have subcomponents like the RC client bindings that could have different owners. It’s not really clear who the people in charge of things are and if they still have the time, passion and drive to be that role. For example, the maintainer of the Perl driver doesn’t have time really due to a new addition to the family. (Congrats Luke!)
  • Conference – I think Selenium is large enough that we could easily have a small conference focused specifically on it. I’m envisioning something like GLSEC where there is one day of tutorials and one day of track talks (Starting out, Advaced-ish, Ecosystem, Hack-a-thon). It could also be used for the Steering Committee Annual Meeting.
  • Dead Trees – There is, so far, no books on Selenium that I know of. A couple have a chapter in them (like the RSpec book) but there isn’t one specifically on it. I know of I think 3 that are in the middle of being written, but none have been picked up by a publisher. Again, that I know of.

I have a hook for a book and have sent one proposal out, we’ll see where that leads. The steering committee is largely out of my hands, but if it was created and they wanted me on it, I wouldn’t say no. And the component issues I think will sort itself out eventually once the leadership situation is resolved. I suppose I could organize the conference, but I’m not going to kid myself in thinking I could do it in my ‘spare’ time.

So Santa, you see, it is not too great a list. I’ll even leave carrots out for the reindeer.