[IAEP] Reviving the Deployment Team

[David Farning]

The first step, from the implementation, side is going back to the
basics; focusing on easy technical bugs and easy usability bug.  The
goal is establishing respect and trust between the deployment team and
the developer team.

If we reflect on went well and what did not go so well last year.
Not so well:
We lost some of the passion because we focused on 'nut and bolts'
rather than big ideas.
We lost contact with students, teachers, and deployers by focusing on
the platform.
Well:
Built core community which practices constructionism.  The release
cycle is fundamentally a constructionism cycle. As a community, we
come up with feature requests, technical shortcomings, and usability
shortcomings.  Then, thorough collaboration on the mail lists we came
up with testable solutions.  After a release, there is a period of
reflection on how well those solutions worked.

Established a strong culture of mentoring over telling, leading over
managing,  _doing_ what we can do over _talking_ about what we should
do.

Established a culture of participation over producer/consumer.

Looking forward:
Use what worked well to make progress on the parts of the project
which did not work so well.  High level-- try to create a deployment
team which shares the overall mission, vision,  values, and culture of
Sugar Labs.

Concrete step to make this happen:
1.  If you are at a deployment please start sending bug reports about
minor issues.
2.  If you are not at a deployment please act as a bridge between
deployments and developers.
3.  Everyone can monitor Sur, ieap, and sugar-dev; whenever you see a
issue come in please engage the reporter to help him or her turn the
issue into a good bug report.

Reporting minor issue might seem counter intuitive when looking at it
from a bang-for-buck pov.  But, from a community pov minor issues are
easy to report, easy to turn into bug reports, and often easy to fix.
By starting small we can learn and gain confidence that the process we
are creating work.  Once we have confidence in the process we turn
100% of our energies towards solving those hard problems.

hope that helps
david

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Edward Cherlin<echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Caroline Meeks<solutiongrove at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Let me know how I can help!
>
> Likewise.
>
>> Thanks,
>> CAroline
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 2:47 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> It looks like we have enough sustainable contributors to revive the
>>> Deployment team!
>>>
>>> The existing deployment team information is at
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team .  I would like to begin
>>> by slightly narrowing the deployment teams mission to:
>>>
>>> The mission of the Deployment Team is to enable Sugar deployments to
>>> participate fully in the Sugar community by organizing forums for the
>>> exchange of experience and needs between Sugar users and Sugar
>>> developers.
>>>
>>> Once these tasks are well under way we can expand the mission as needed.
>>>
>>> Maria del Pilar Saenz of SugarLabs Colombia has offered to be the
>>> initial co-ordinator for the team.  Maria is both close to deployments
>>> and quite articulate and knowledgeable about our high-level goals.
>>>
>>> Over the next couple of weeks, I hope we can revisit the team's
>>> roadmap, resources, and TODO list to start minimizing the
>>> communication barriers between deployments and developers.
>>>
>>> In order, to get this started Tomeu has mentioned that he is willing
>>> to shift his Sugar Labs time from working on new features to fixing
>>> bugs.
>>>
>>> david
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
> And Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
> http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)
>