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

[Wade Brainerd]

Hello,

I have been working in my spare time as a third party activity
developer since the Boston Game Jam last June.  I am responsible for
the Colors! and Bounce (formerly 3dpong) activities, and am mentoring
the GSoC Typing Tutor application independently this summer.

> For now, We need to at least make it easier for software developers to
> create activities w/in a short span of time.

As an activity developer, I agree with this statement, but I think it
goes beyond creating activities and extends to evaluating, deploying,
supporting, maintaining them.

I quickly got an XO and people on IRC have been happy to answer my
questions.  SJ was very supportive when I released the first versions
of both my activities.   But since then, there isn't much sense that
my work is still noticed. For example,

- My activities are listed on a page with dozens of broken, half
finished or "idea" projects.  There is nothing to indicate that I
actually finished mine.
- I have yet to hear that my activities have been used by children
(since the game jam judging at least).
- I'm still waiting for feedback on my UI from the Sugar team (Hi Eben! :)).
- Nobody has offered to help localize my activities (I was careful to
use gettext!).  Fortunately, some community members offered icons.
- There have been no bug reports from the organization, only community members.
- I had to traverse a web of activity source, half-finished wiki
pages, mailing lists and sparse pydoc to figure out how to use the
APIs properly.
- I followed the steps to get my activities into Joyride builds over a
month ago (#6766), but have seen no response yet.
- Releasing versions is a bit too cumbersome for a part time developer
- wiki upload, d.l.o upload, many wiki links, multiple changes files,
etc.

Personally, I want a featured wiki page for high quality, non-core
activities.  I want timely feedback and testing from the organization
for new releases of my activities.  I want an organized, up to date
Sugar API Reference and User Manual.  I want someone to see I have
checked in a new version of my activity and say "hey, I'll get that
tested, translated, packaged and distributed for you, and will notify
the deployments" :)  Most importantly I want feedback that my projects
are good and are being used, that they need more work, or something in
between.

I imagine that other "ecosystem" projects like Gnome or KDE have some
applications that are maintained by the "core team" and others that
are contributed by third parties.  I would be interested to know what
the relationship is like.

Please don't construe these issues as a complaint about the Sugar team
or the OLPC organization.  I think they simply need to hire more
people or possibly refocus some of the ones they have.

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> And when I say "documentation", I mean "a handful of awesome activities
> that are copiously documented in a literate programming style."

I personally had good luck with the source code to the core activities
when implementing my own.  I also put a fair amount of work into
documenting the source code to Colors! while I was writing it, though
Python is not my first language.

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/colors;a=summary

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> I tested all of the OLPC Games activities on build 699 and
> none of them worked. That was quite disappointing, esp. when Pong didn't
> work :(

Have you tried it since I renamed it "Bounce" and added the level editor?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bounce

I'd love to hear if it's still having issues, I'm on a kind of old
joyride build.

Best,

Wade