[IAEP] Teacher in Uruguay enchanted to see his ideas integrated, into global Sugar update

[Greg Smith]

Hi All,

On this:
 > Perhaps you would be interested in http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6950.  I
 > > think all these things would go together nicely.

"Changed 2 months ago by gregorio
milestone deleted Milestone Never Assigned deleted "

When I started at OLPC one of the first things I did was clean up the 
roadmap in Trac. There were a handful of vague "may want to do it in the 
future" milestones. I deleted a few of those before I realized that it 
would also remove them from the bug IDs. That's why you see these messages.

We do need to figure out where to put it on the roadmap and I'm not 
opposed to this idea.

On the subject of gathering input from users its been a recurring theme 
of the lists and I have commented on it several times. Its an important 
problem which we must grapple with. Initially I thought "we need more 
input and information". Then in December I started to realize how much 
input is already available. I collected some of them on my talk page at: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio

There are wikis, forums, moodles and other sites already full of 
suggestions and comments about the product. Aside from the ones on my 
talk page I can mention
- Moodle out of Peru: http://www.innovavirtual.org/moodleperu/
- Forum in Uruguay http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/
- Our OLPC forum http://en.forum.laptop.org/
and of course the olpc-sur list.

Also I understand that kids in Uruguay and elsewhere have been 
downloading this activity: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XoIRC and it has a 
default channel which has been very active. There is also a spanish IRC 
channel which has seen a lot of use.

Even the question of which is the right tool to gather more suggestions 
is something we should ask people to suggest! If you want people to give 
input, its better to ask them what works best for them than to decide 
that yourself. I have been mulling over the best communication channels 
with Pablo out of Uruguay for 9 moths and we still don't have a 
definitive answer.

For me, the question is not so much how do we gather more input as how 
do we respond to the input already expressed.

The requests do not generally come in like: I want a button on the 
right. The people using the XO are teaching or learning so the request 
is usually more like: its too slow make it faster or I need better tools 
to teach geometry. See the Sur list for some comments like  that.

After an intial suggestions, you need a further discussion befoe it gets 
to exactly what code needs to be written. In terms of how we engage that 
dialog, I wrote a brief explanation of how I think it should work at: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio

We're now engaged in the practice of it and we need that piece along 
with the theory to get it right.

In terms of building in a "please fix it" button, I'm in favor of that. 
I think it should be an activity not a piece of the OS until we can 
prove the concept and show that we can collect good feedback, generate a 
meanigful dialog and most importantly respond in a constructive way to 
the requests.

Lastly, if a user has asked for something which is documented and well 
defined and we think it should be built then go ahead and put it on the 
9.1 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 I just ask that you sign it or 
put it on the talk page.

To Christoph's original point. They already asked, now we need to 
deliver on that. How about starting with this one: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Touchpad
or this one:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Longer_Battery_Life

:-)

I hope that's constructive. I want to see more feedback and more 
responsiveness to requests. My main point is that the ball is in our 
court. Once we find people to engage with the only way to get there is 
with a rich dialog where we learn about the users and they learn about 
building software.

Thanks,

Greg S