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

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:06 AM, Christoph Derndorfer
<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> 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?"

s/whom/who/ The structure is "who will maintain it?" Adding another
clause doesn't change that.

>  >> 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 :-)

I have made Wiki pages to offer corrected versions of some of the main
site page 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*.

It is well known that the job of governance in Open Source development
consists of herding cats, and not as well known as it should be that
the way to herd cats is not to tell them what to do, but to convince
them that that is what they wanted to do in the first place, and it
has nothing to do with you. This is only possible if your goals and
theirs actually are aligned, and it is only necessary to find the
context in which this alignment is visible. Unless you can afford to
put enough cat food at the spot where you want them to congregate.
Context and cat food may in our case both consist of shiny new toys
that they get to play with.

Another principle of cat-herding is the Leader Principle: find out
where people are headed and get out in front of them. Or figure out
where they would head if they understood the issues, and stake out a
position over there. Like RMS and Free Software. The naysayers still
think he's nuts, of course, and us, too. Some cats herd more readily
than others, so you start with who shows up.

>  > 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?

Somebody asked them?

>  > 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.

Nicholas Negroponte and the old-style managers at OLPC (Fadel and
Kane) have almost never talked to the community at all, unlike Walter
Bender and Kim Quirk.

>  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?

Seth Woodworth tried to start one, http://olpczine.org/, but AFAIK I'm
the only one to contribute to it. Also AFAIK, nothing prevents us from
jumping and and running with it. Take a look and tell us what 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.

Me! Me! That's me! (Well, Sayamindu is in charge of Pootle. I don't
know who got the previous several dozen projects started last year.)

I have been recruiting localizers for Cambodia, Haiti, and Rwanda.
G1G1 has more than 10,000 XOs on order for each of them, but nobody
had thought to get the projects started. Haiti was straightforward to
find people for, including one from Ubutu localization, Rwanda is easy
because of the government's campaign to computerize the whole country
and make Rwanda the high-tech hub of Africa, but in Cambodia it's like
pulling teeth. Mentally, they seem not to have recovered from the
Khmer Rouge sufficiently to be willing to express their own opinions
in public, or to support others in doing so. The whole country is
remarkably slow to adopt Wikis, open forums, and the like. Also,
Javier Sola of the KhmerOS project is actively hostile to OLPC in
general, and to me in particular.

One person cannot recruit all of the localizers. I need to recruit
recruiters. Anybody? Pass it through your networks. I have found
several people to help through LinkedIn. BTW, you're all invited to
connect with me there.

>  > 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.

I don't know how big a factor the titles would be. Showing
appreciation in a more practical way, say by listening to the
volunteers, seems more important to me.

>  > 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

-- 
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