[IAEP] Teams!

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2008, David Farning wrote:

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

Thanks David.  But to be clear here: I'm not fundamentally concerned with 
wiki improvements, per se.  I'm talking about team improvements.  If these 
teams are, in fact, teams, that how do we ensure that we are treating them 
as such?  A set of wiki pages is not a team.  A team is a group of people 
working together to accomplish a goal.  Each team's wiki pages should be a 
reflection of that reality.

> 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.

I do not dispute any of this.  To be clear: my comments are almost 
completely orthogonal to the wiki.  The wiki is merely a tool.

To be as simple and as blunt as possible: a team that does not have a 
leader, a task list with owners, and a regular meeting time, might as well 
not even exist.  We should either bring all of our teams up to speed, or 
do away with them.  My $0.02.

FWIW, I would like to take over the marketing team, roll events into it, 
and start driving it -- which I will start to do next week.  Lest anyone 
think I'm just trying to make work for other people.  ;)

--g