[Its.an.education.project] An "About" statement?

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Mon, 5 May 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

> On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 18:18 +0200, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>> > If I've learned any lesson in my years
>> > in Fedora, it's this: attempts to generate community are wasted if there
>> > is not an adequate architecture of participation to sustain that
>> > community.
>>
>>  Greg's absolutely right. It has been very difficult for volunteers to
>>  get involved w/ OLPC for the last couple years. The learning curve is
>>  very steep, esp. for less technical folks. I remember the hassles of
>>  trying to get sugar-jhbuild running on my laptop 12 months ago, *the
>>  suffering*.  It still is far too difficult to get involved in Sugar for
>>  the reasons Greg pointed out.
>>
>>  It especially difficult for non-technical educators to get involved. We
>>  need to work on lowering these barriers.
>>
>>  We would all love for kids to develop their own learning activities but
>>  that just hasn't come to pass so far. We've been developing learning
>>  activities w/ ETOys w/ the hope that kids could build upon our
>>  activities and improve them. But the Squeak code gets complicated
>>  quickly, and performance issues multiply like rabbits.
>>
>>  For now, We need to at least make it easier for software developers to
>>  create activities w/in a short span of time.
>
> Other than the build issues, which we are working on, what else do you
> see as blocking/discouraging people to write activities? Lack of
> documentation?

Yes.

It has seemed, from my (increasingly distant) perspective, that the APIs 
have never really been stable enough to merit documentation -- any effort 
in documenting code today would be useless in three months.  If that's 
changed, that would be great.

And when I say "documentation", I mean "a handful of awesome activities 
that are copiously documented in a literate programming style."

But if any part of the API is unstable -- like, for instance, the activity 
sharing API -- then *all* of the focus needs to be on shoring that part 
up.  Personally, I don't think that activities are all that interesting 
until every single one of them can be shared in at least some small but 
meaningful way.

My $0.02.

--g

-- 
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"