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

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 12:14 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 2:36 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > 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. %-]
>
>  Hi Edward, thanks for your suggestions.

You're welcome.

>  I was responding to a discussion about what could be done to encourage
>  third party activity development.  This list was my opinion about what
>  could be done, I did not mean for it to sound like complaining to you.

That's all right. I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining either.

>  One of the goals of any organization which collaborates with the open
>  source community is to maximize the ability of the community to
>  contribute.  Community members will naturally be at a disadvantage
>  versus organization members, but there may be many more more of them,
>  so effort spent helping them can have a multiplicative effect.  On the
>  other hand, requiring community programmers to penetrate bureaucracy
>  is an inefficient use of resources.

I don't want you to have to penetrate bureaucracy. But at the moment,
somebody needs to take up some of these issues, and the rest of us
need to get behind whoever that is. Kim Quirk says she wants to fix
these problems, and I know that many people have been trying to get
working processes under quite difficult circumstances.

>  I think that one real thing the OLPC organization could do to improve
>  community participation is to find more helpful people like SJ, who do
>  what they can to make programmers like me as effective as possible.

Indeed. Nicholas Negroponte seems not to understand this point. Some
parts of OLPC are quite opaque.

>  Cheers,
>  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