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

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Thank you. At certain conferences that will get you all the coffee you
can drink, and an occasional slice of pizza. %-]

>  > 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.

Basically, this means finding volunteers to do all of the chores other
than coding. :-(

>  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.

It's a Wiki. You knew when you finished, and you could have let everybody know.

>  - I have yet to hear that my activities have been used by children
>  (since the game jam judging at least).

We all lack feedback from the children on every subject.

>  - I'm still waiting for feedback on my UI from the Sugar team (Hi Eben! :)).

Not my area.

>  - Nobody has offered to help localize my activities (I was careful to
>  use gettext!).  Fortunately, some community members offered icons.

What do you mean, offered to help? Didn't you give Sayamindu your .po
files? The only way localizers know what to localize is seeing it on
Pootle. There is more than enough there to keep us occupied.

>  - There have been no bug reports from the organization, only community members.

There are  about a hundred times more community members than staff,
and everybody in the organization is crushingly overworked. Why would
you expect them to do it?

>  - 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.

Can I have your notes? Maybe I can make something useful to others out of them.

>  - I followed the steps to get my activities into Joyride builds over a
>  month ago (#6766), but have seen no response yet.

A lot of our processes are somewhat broken. It sometimes helps if you
mention the problem to someone when you encounter it. Who was supposed
to respond?

>  - Releasing versions is a bit too cumbersome for a part time developer

I don't understand from this description what your issue is. It looks
as though your statement could mean that you got your activity working
once, but you don't have time to change it to maintain compatibility
with changes in Sugar. If so, well, that's how it is in Open Source.
If not, please explain what is really wrong.

>  - wiki upload, d.l.o upload, many wiki links, multiple changes files,
>  etc.

Yup. It's a Wiki all right. Many people fail to update the information
about their work. I don't know whose job they suppose that is,
considering that nobody gets paid to do it.

>  Personally, I want a featured wiki page for high quality, non-core
>  activities.

Excellent. Go make one.

> I want timely feedback and testing from the organization
>  for new releases of my activities.

I want better times, but it turns out that I have to do that myself.
Kim Quirk has said that OLPC cannot afford to do the testing on
contributed activities, and that the developers will have to do it or
otherwise arrange for it. So we need a volunteer QA team on machines
other than OLPC's Sugar QA farm. Anybody who wants the job can have
it, although we would like to have somebody with experience in testing
involved.

> I want an organized, up to date
>  Sugar API Reference and User Manual.

So do I. That's why I offered to write one, if I can get the source
material from developers.

> 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" :)

The process is known to be broken, particularly for low-priority,
non-core software. You have to do a lot of it yourself, or bother
overworked staffers who have been pulled to something currently of
higher priority. Again.

>  Most importantly I want feedback that my projects
>  are good and are being used, that they need more work, or something in
>  between.

You could ask on Grassroots.

>  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.

Difficult. If you work at it, it can work for you.

>  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.

Thisl is going to remain a predominantly volunteer effort. You can
tell Kim Quirk all of this, and she can hire everybody on her
wishlist, and you'll still end up having to do a lot of it yourself
for the foreseeable future.

>  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

Thanks.

>  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.

I had the idea that doing new development on top of joyride builds was
hazardous to your mental health. Why don't you work with something a
little more stable? Then you only have to update it when new features
become stable.

>  Best,
>
>  Wade

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay