[Its.an.education.project] www.planet-sugar.com (Was: Cleaning up the activities page)

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Greg DeKoenigsberg schrieb:
> 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.
>   
I just had an idea which might be able to address some of the issues 
(facilitating activity testing and development, tying in contributors, 
making new activities more visible, more overall community engagement) 
which we've been discussing here.

How 'bout setting up www.planet-sugar.com (working title) which could 
basically be the one-stop-resource when it comes to activity 
development, testing and related matters? Something along the lines of 
Gamasutra.com or what PlanetHalfLife used to be back in the day. We 
could include reviews of activities, have featured activities of the 
week / month, competitions, how-to articles, interviews with different 
community members, etc. Basically an xo-zine on steroids focused on 
activity development...

What do you think?

Cheers,
Christoph

> 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
>
>