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

[Simon Schampijer]

Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> 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
> 

Hi Greg,

I think we missed a lot of opportunities regarding the community 
involvement in OLPC. Your points are very well put. I referred lately 
several times already to this post:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01560.html

I think that the community need to be represented in the decision 
process as well and like you say need to have "core responsibilities".

Best,
    Simon