[IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> 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?

It is absolutely invalid, IMHO.

> 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.

Yep.  This is exactly right, and is one of the driving ideas behind making 
Sugar a first-class desktop environment in Fedora.

There are a number of compromises to be made, I think.  No, the typical 
Fedora developer will not be a teacher or a kid -- but if they grow 
accustomed to using Sugar, they will experience pain, and will be 
motivated to fix that pain in a way that is consistent with Sugar's goals. 
Assuming that (a) the pain isn't so terrible as to make it unusable, and 
(b) we are effective in communicating Sugar's goals.

Seriously, though: journaling and collaboration, by themselves, are 
exciting not just to kids but to regular people.  The idea of 
"CollAbiWord" is incredibly exciting to everyone I discuss it with.

--g