[IAEP] Teams!

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

I love the idea of teams.  Teams working together are awesome.  Teams 
share a common goal.  Teams hold one another accountable.  Go Team!

So we've got a list of teams on the left navbar of the Sugar wiki (and one 
or two elsewhere).  I figured I'd check them all out and give my 
unsolicited feedback.  Since that's what I do.  ;)

===

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:

* Having every team work mostly the same way is *really* useful.  It allows 
volunteers to move comfortably from team to team.  Seems like the common 
structure indicates that folks kinda get that already.

* Every team needs a leader.  Whether it's a coach or just a star player, 
it helps newcomers *tremendously* to know who the Go-To person is.  At the 
very least, it should be immediately clear, from the very first page, who 
is accountable for moving this team forward.  It is *frequently* unclear 
currently who's leading a team.

* Every team needs a goal.  What's the purpose of your team?  What problem are 
you trying to solve?  It really helps to make these goals *simple* and 
*explicit*.

* Every team needs meetings.  It really helps to relate with your 
teammates real-time, even if it's just on IRC.  To that end, I think that 
a "MEETINGS" tab should be added to the Team Template pages.  Most of the 
functional teams currently have meeting pages, fwiw.

* Every team needs a TODO list, and it's part of the template, which is 
nice -- but what good is a TODO list if there aren't names and dates 
associated with it?

* I love the generic structure of the team pages -- but the details are still 
somewhat lacking in most cases.  :)

===

SPECIFIC TEAM OBSERVATIONS:

http://sugarlabs.org/go/AccessibiltyTeam
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Ouch.  A link to a wiki that doesn't load, and nothing but blank stub pages. 
Even the URL has a speling errur.  WHO'S THE COACH?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/BuildTeam
---------------------------------
Ouch again.  All empty stubs.  WHO'S THE COACH?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam
--------------------------------------
Ah, a bit better.  The home page is full of useful information, including 
meeting times, minutes, and a list of team members.  That's great! Judging from 
the minutes, though, it looks like the meeting was attended by two members in 
early October, perhaps not held in mid-October, and no meeting has yet been 
scheduled for November at all.  Is everything okay with this team?  Looks like 
Walter Bender is the coach here.  Is Walter overextended?  Can someone else 
step up and lead this team?  Or are we considering ditching this team 
altogether in favor of a LoCo model?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/DesignTeam
----------------------------------
A bit of info, but looks like it hasn't taken off yet.  Most of the pages are 
stubs.  If I had to guess, looks like Eben Eliason is the coach here, amirite? 
Seems as though there's been one meeting since September, is that true?  Have 
there been meetings since?  Even if producing formal minutes is painful, maybe 
post IRC logs?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam ---------------------------------------
The most developed, which is not at all surprising, I guess.  :)  Clear that 
Simon and Marco are the leaders here.  Lots of good info on how to participate, 
lots of links in various states of repair, but that's ok. The meetings page is 
absolutely brilliant and extremely well-maintained, with agendas, logs and 
summaries of every meeting for months.  Go Team Go!
Curious that the TODO list is empty, though.  :)

http://sugarlabs.org/go/DocumentationTeam 
-----------------------------------------
It appears as though the stated goal is to work with FLOSS Manuals, rather than 
creating our own team.  I'm not convinced that this is sufficient. Just because 
we use the FLOSS Manuals infrastucture (which is very good), that does not 
imply that Sugar shouldn't have a documentation team.  What work needs to be 
done?  Who's getting together regularly to assess progress?  Who's the coach -- 
is it Anne Gentle?  Is it Ed Cherlin?  Is it someone else?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/InfrastructureTeam
------------------------------------------
Lots of good stuff here.  Looks like Bernie is the man here... right, Bernie? 
Love the links to all supported infrastructure, even though some of them are 
busted.  The TODO list is good, but again -- no owners, no dates?  And the 
Getting Involved section is completely empty!  Booooo! When are your meetings? 
As a side note: IMHO, infrastructure is the *best* way to get geeks involved. 
There are a ton of bored sysadmins out there, and this kind of work is right up 
their alley.  This good be a great technial onramp project for Sugarlabs.

http://sugarlabs.org/go/LocalizationTeam
----------------------------------------
Clearly just a stub driving people to the OLPC Localization work, which is 
probably appropriate for now.

http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam
-----------------------------------
Lots of good info, contact info is clear.  Are there regular meetings? And the 
"Getting Involved" section appears to be a Testing page.  I presume that will 
be deprecated in favor of the actual TestingTeam pages? Is there no other way 
to get involved in release work?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/TranslationTeam
---------------------------------------
The first page is an *awesome* resource for how to translate wiki pages... so 
is that the goal?  Getting wiki pages translated?  Maybe this should be a 
subset of the Wiki team instead?  Or maybe their should be actual separate 
language teams?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/TestingTeam
-----------------------------------
Clearly in progress, clear that dfarning is the owner, the Triage guide is a 
good start, meetings will help here tremendously, and since that's the one 
thing on the TODO list, I'd say that's spot on.  :)

http://sugarlabs.org/go/WikiTeam
--------------------------------
Who's the owner... cjl?  The TODO list looks good... names attached?

http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam
-------------------------------------
Why isn't it linked from the left nav?  Who's the owner?  Meetings?

===

That's all for now.  Comments/flames welcome.

--g