[IAEP] list of complaints from sugarcamp community building talk

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi, this is awesome feedback. I'm going to speak from the SugarLabs perspective.

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Elsa Culler <eculler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Last night at sugarcamp, we(people from the Olin college OLPC chapter) were
> asked to come up with a list of roadblocks  we have run into in trying to
> volunteer effectively.  Mel Chua asked me to forward it to these lists, so
> here is the list in text format:
>
> we have to come up with jobs ourselves, and we're not too good at it
>
> we don't know what we can do that is useful
>
> when we are told what to do, we have to check with other people to make sure
> it's ok

Point taken, we need to come up with a good list of interesting things
that people can start with. Somewhat related, I keep up a TODO list of
things in http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tomeu that interested people
can take from my hands. Wonder how we could make this more
discoverable?

> we don't have easy access to cool things that are going on in OLPC that
> would get people excited
>
>  -for example - it would make people excited just to hear accounts of
> deployments

Could you check out the weekly newsletter published in Walter's blog
(http://walterbender.org/) and see how much it suits your needs?
SugarLabs cannot say much about OLPC deployments, but we hope to have
pilots of our own soon, and hopefully deployments will follow.

> most meetings happen when we are in class and we don't know what happened or
> give input
>
>  - especially with commute (it takes us 1;30 hrs to get here)

Most SugarLabs meetings happen on IRC, so you wouldn't have the
commute issue. Please check out the meeting announcements in the
sugar-devel and iaep mailing lists and comment if the times don't work
out for you, we probably can change them.

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/

> it's difficult to find out what OLPC does beyond the broad mission-statement
> sort of thing

Probably, SL could do better as well, can you comment about what's
missing in Walter's newsletter?

> it took me 6 months to figure out how to use irc, i still don't know where
> trac is

Definitely a problem. We are thinking about having a landing page
similar to the one in http://www.eclipse.org/ that hopefully will give
a way for everybody to find how to better interact with us depending
on their role. The idea is that a prospecting developer would just
click on one of those icons and would find a simple explanation of the
first concepts that need to be grabbed in order to move forward. How
does that sound?

> olpc-dev list emails are kind of over my head

Yeah, we should understand better this issue. Is a coder-newbies
mailing list a valid suggestion?

> where are things? (on wiki, etc)

David Farning is working on this, following a never ending list of
complaints from Greg DeKoenigsberg.

> note - if you teach us how stuff works we can tell more people/translate the
> information

Totally, we count on you to help us, we are totally aware that by
ourselves cannot do it.

> I would like to develop activities, but up until now I didn't even know it
> was up for grabs

Ooops ;)

> Thanks for listening!

Thanks to you, this definitely helps.

Regards,

Tomeu