[IAEP] Sugar - Local Lab - Partners

[David Farning]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 6:00 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> I have gotten confused by all of the threads going on about Local
> Labs:( So, as far as I am concerned, if the conversation doesn't
> happen on IAEP or a scheduled meeting, it didn't happen.  Yes, I meant
> to un-subscribe from slobs.  Yes, I am aware that if notion that
> knowledge is power holds true, I have given up all of my power.

Hey, just a quick follow up.  I received about a dozen emails about
this paragraph:(

Yes, I think that private mailing lists in community based projects
are evil.  But, as with many things, they are a necessary evil.  They
are useful in three specific cases:
1. Personal matters.  Unfortunately, some people act in ways that are
counter productive to the community.  Private lists can provide a
means to plan for and handle 'poisonous people.'

2. Legal issues.  Is company x is abusing our trademark?  A community,
or its members speaking on behalf of the community, needs to think
long and hard before using the community as a launch point for
publicly speaking out against another organization.  That thinking
should happen in private.

3. Confidential negotiations.  Occasionally, communities must enter
confidential negations with third parties.  Perhaps, a government or
company is exploring how to work with the community.  To avoid
premature speculation, the community needs to be able to hold those
conversations in a semi private manner.

With that being said, I do not believe that Sugar Labs is using the
slobs mailing list outside of the scope of the above three points.

_I_ am the one getting confused!  I currently have dozens of different
conversations going on about Local Labs. I am forgetting who said
what.  I am going to try to consolidate them on IAEP.

<Community Theory>
#Feel free to skip

The question that I am looking at is how to divide the community on
trust rather than mistrust.  Examples of trust based divisions are our
relationship with;

The Ubuntu SugarTeam, how many people know anything about what they do
and how they do it besides that fact the Sugar packages now ship in
Ubuntu:)

DebianOLPC, same as above.  But, if you read their mailing list you
will find a steady stream of posts between Jonas, Holger, the Debian
bug tracker, the Debian Archive administrator, and the rest of the
crew.

SL InfrastructureTeam.  How many of us care that the wiki is running
on solarsail, git on OSL, and schools.sl.o on a machine hosted by
Solutions Grove?  This autonomous team did not spontaneous overnight.
There was a lot of hard work on the part of Bernie, Ivan, and Luke.
Some leaning on the part of Walter.  Equal amounts of begging and
bitching on my part.

SL DevelopmentTeam.  Last week I modified my email filter so threads
from sugar-devel are marked read by default.  I felt myself struggling
with that one.  After all, isn't the developmentTeam the heart of the
project?  No, the DevelopmentTeam is the foundation on which
everything else is built.  But, it is not the heart.  I trust Marco
and the rest of the team to make the correct choices.

In each of the above groups, there is at least one person with a deep
understanding of Sugar Labs mission, vision, and values.  In three of
the four examples one person helped define the mission, vision, and
values!  In the fourth case, Debian, Sugar Lab's mission, vision, and
values were strongly influenced by the success of their project.

On the flight home from SugarCamp, I read 'The starfish and the
spider.' To make a long story short. If you chop off a spider's legs,
it dies.  If you chop off a starfish's legs, each leg can regrow into
a new starfish.  Quite a compelling argument for leaderless
organizations!

While pretty close, the analogy does not quite fit for the spread of
Sugar Labs. Hopefully, we are not going to chop off a leg (or team in
our case) and expect it to regrow somewhere else.

Instead, I hope we are going to use the Sugar Labs community to
develop leaders who are capable of helping Local Labs flourish.  Let's
see, Bernie, our infrastructure leader, has a visa which is expiring
in a few week.  Tomue, a core developer, is looking to move soon.
Rafael, the deployment team co-leader setting up a pilot lab.

Recently, we have had an influx of new people become active on this
list.  The open question is how do we engage them to participate and
become the future leaders that will be ready and able to foster local
labs.

</Community Theory>

thanks
david