[IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software

[Bert Freudenberg]

Cutting this important part out of another discussion ...

On 10.11.2008, at 20:49, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:

> Of course, this all supposes the open source model. If someone gets  
> paid
> to do a Python Etoys or a GNU Smalltalk one then I wouldn't be at all
> surprised to see a good quality implementation created from scratch in
> just a couple of months.

I have been thinking about this for quite a while - how valid is the  
assumption that a volunteer community would be able to create software  
that they do not intend to use themselves?

For example, Etoys development was not driven by volunteers, but by a  
small research group around Alan Kay with paid developers. It is open- 
source and free, but we get relatively few contributions from  
volunteer developers. This is in contrast to Squeak, the underlying  
system, which is supported and advanced by a thriving community of  
developers. But the majority of the Squeak community is not interested  
in Etoys, just in the Smalltalk development system (which they use and  
improve for themselves).

I see a similar issue with Sugar - since no-one seems genuinely  
interested in making it their own environment, but rather developing  
it for someone else, progress pretty much is made only by the  
(unfortunately few) paid developers. The few parents / teachers who  
might want to contribute are not savvy enough to actually do so.

Is there an example where volunteer-driven development succeeded that  
was not of the "scratch-your-own-itch" kind? If so, what can we learn  
from them?

- Bert -