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

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 1:59 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>  - 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.

Yeah. We need a way to distinguish between ideas/half finished
activities and mature ones. One way to do it might be to "bless"
 a set of activities and include them in the release process and
schedule. That would also means they get more attention and testing by
the QA community (which we should form).

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

Direct feedback from the deployments is somewhat lacking. I expect it
will happen but it will take time to construct good communication
channels.

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

GNOME had a UI review process for a while and I thought it was pretty
useful. Perhaps we should try to come up with something similar. It
could be as simple as opening UI review tickets in a certain component
in trac and ensure the UI team keeps an eye on it and address the
tickets as soon as possible.

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

Has your activity been added to pootle?

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

OLPC has no QA team at the moment so that's not surprising. I actually
think QA can and should handled mostly by the community. We really
need to start coordinating that effort...

>  - 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.

The state of the documentation is really poor. We need to fix this. I
think it should be one of top the priorities on the roadmap for the
next release.

>  - 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.

We need to streamline the release process. It's something I plan to
work on in the very short time.

>  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.

GNOME doesn't quite have a core team. There are coordinated releases
though and a set of core modules (libraries and applications). I think
that's something we need to start doing really soon.

>  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.

We also need to start working more and better for the community. It's
true that we are swamped and that the resources are very constrained.
But that's one more reason to leverage our community.

Thanks a lot for your feedback and work. Don't lose hopes, things will
get better.

Marco