[Its.an.education.project] Cleaning up the activities page

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

>> People new to wikis often find them confusing and and frankly hard to
>> navigate, definitely not intuitive. Let's not bend the people to fit the
>> tool.
>
> In my mind, this is the result of missing full time maintainers
> with a clear web design in mind.  A CMS by itself would not solve
> the issue; It could even make it worse.

Ding ding ding.  I see this conversation in Fedora-land all the time.  The 
"real web site" people say "we need a real web site".  The wiki people say 
"and just whom do you expect will maintain it?"

> For example, look at OLPC's institutional web site: the People page
> lists people that walked away, people I have never seen and other
> inaccuracies.  Journalists look at this shiny thing for a moment,
> then come back asking if perhaps we also have a web site with real
> content :-)

Yep.

Really, it all comes back to people to do the work -- and the more people 
you have, the more governance you need.  And *not* so that you can "tell 
people what to do" -- the purpose for governance is to know what people 
are doing.  To know *who* is responsible for *what*.

In the activity space, we see a lot of similar problems here that are 
similar to other open source projects.  The need for testing.  The need 
for localization.  We must ask ourselves: why do people step up to these 
tasks in other organizations, but not in this one?

I would posit that it's because people who participate in other 
organizations are recognized in some way for their participation and 
leadership.  For example: we started having community success in Fedora 
only when we started to give *real, core responsibilities* to people 
outside of the Red Hat side of the organization.  Funny thing: when your 
name becomes very publicly associated with something, you will *bust your 
ass* not to see it fail.  OLPC never turned this trick.  Maybe Sugar can.

Any possible Sugar foundation that depends upon volunteers should start to 
consider questions of governance sooner, rather than later.  We need 
localization?  Create the (unpaid, of course) "VP of localization for the 
Sugar foundation," who recruits a team of volunteers.  We need testing? 
Create the (unpaid, of course) "director of quality assurance for the 
Sugar foundation" who recruits a team of volunteers.  We need a great 
website?  Create the (unpaid, of course) "Czar of Content Management" who 
recruits a team of volunteers.  Look at the number of VPs in the Apache 
organization; it's insane.  But it's incredibly effective.  Who wants to 
be the "VP of Failure"?  No one.  Which means that when you *do* find 
people who are legitimately willing to take leadership roles, they will 
work night and day to create success.

The future of Sugar will depend on volunteers, and on the ability of all 
of us to get the most out of those volunteers -- including enabling them 
to make Important Choices on behalf of the organization.  Learn from 
OLPC's failures in this regard.

--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"