[IAEP] Teams!

[David Farning]

Greg,
Thanks for taking the time to put together the well though out list of
concrete improvement that we can make to the wiki.

First the credit.  I idea of teams came from SJ while we were discussing the
relationship between the SL and OLPC wikis.  I was talking about the _best_
place to host different content.  SJ suggested that their was not a best
place.  Rather, he stated a lot of content fits in both places, just from
different _perspectives_.

Hence, the idea of teams or sub communities tackling the Sugar Labs mission
from different angles.

On stubs.  A wiki is an interesting collaborative tool.  The wiki's value is
ultimately as a source of information for readers.  Here we get to the
tricky part.  The wiki is of little value as a source of information until
it contains substantive, well written, and easily located articles.  But,
nobody wants to go through the bother of researching, writing, and
organizing the content until they feel there work would have an impact on
future readers.

Several community theorists advocate 'worse is better' as a starting point
for generating initial content.  As long as a community starts with
'something', that something can gradually improve until it becomes something
useful.

FWIW, when we help the initial wiki barn raising about 6 months ago, we were
averaging (very roughly) about 2 wiki contributions per day.  Now we are up
to about 10 per day.  If we can stay on that rate of increase, we will
exceed 40 contributions per day in another 6 months.

thanks
david

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:

>
> 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
> ----------------------------------------
> 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
> _______________________________________________
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