[IAEP] Volunteer-driven development of educational software

[David Farning]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> 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?

A question for the ages....

> 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?
>

Mission, Vision, Values - Impact.

We need to look outside of the walls of the 'Open source Development
Community' and into the world of traditional philanthropy.  Sugar Labs
is not just a  piece of software, Its An Education Project.

Finding contributors will not be all that difficult in the long run.
All we have to do is:
Find people and organizations that share our mission, vision, and values.
Show them how their contributions to Sugar Labs will have an impact on
the world.

The world is full of surprisingly good people. We just need to find them:)

david