[Dextrose] Roadmap for Activity Central

[David Farning]

As one of the organizations behind Dextrose, I would like to lay out
the organization of Activity Central.  Hopefully, this will provide an
idea of how AC will fit into Dextrose development and how we can work
to together to make Dextrose a valuable part or your deployment.

The center of Dextrose is the project manager, Steven Parish.  Steven
coordinates the Dextrose project by 1) taking input from deployments,
2) turning deployment input into bug reports and feature requests
which he then assigns to AC developers, and 3) rebuilding Dextrose
snapshots for delivery to deployment testers.

The focus of the the Project is the on site developer, Anish Mangal.
(Anish is currently waiting for a visa to Paraguay.)  Anish ensures
that Dextrose meets deployment's needs by providing feedback to the PM
about the needs and wants of 'his' deployment.  Anish's secondary goal
is to mentor local deployment developers to work effectively within
the OLPC ecosystem.  As Activity Central grows, we will increase the
number of on site developers to match our total developer capacity.

The foundation of the project is the developers, Martin Abente,
Aleksey Lim, and Sascha Silbe.  Martin is the Dextro developer.
Aleksey and Sascha are upstream developers.  Martin will focus on the
overall sanity of the dextrose code base.  Aleksey and Sascha will
work with upstream Sugar and OLPC.  Activity Central also hires
developers for contracts on specific bugs or feature requests.

Bernie, the CTO, keeps the ball rolling.

The structure allows AC to create Dextrose as a deployment driven set
of software based on upstream Fedora, OLPC, and Sugar.  Over the next
several months and years, Dextrose will branch and merge several times
with our upstream projects as we achieve equilibrium between
deployment needs and upstream projects.

As a company, Activity Central will invest the next 5 months proving
Dextrose's viability.  The core questions are. "Can AC cost
effectively develop and maintain the Dextrose product in cooperation
with upstream?",  "Can AC cost effectively provide service and support
for Dextrose?"  Starting in April of 2011 AC will start exploring
revenue models to ensure that we are sustainable.

Activity Central would like to add 2 more developers in the last
quarter of 2010 and an additional 5 developers in the first quarter of
2011.  If you or anyone you know is interested in working with us
please contact us.

david