[IAEP] SoaS as a Sugar Labs project.

[Gary C Martin]

On 25 Aug 2009, at 16:03, Michael Stone wrote:

>> El Mon, 24-08-2009 a las 20:58 +0200, Martin Langhoff escribi=F3:
>>> And also... and completely from the outside... I'll apologise in
>>> advance for saying something I know might be controversial. I worry
>>> that SL seems to have -- for a external party like me -- more
>>> bureaucracy than it has people "doing". IMHExperience, the  
>>> projects I
>>> enjoy working on, and that I see being productive have  a much lower
>>> "procedure/label/committe " : contributor ratio.
>>
>> I don't necessarily disagree with you, but just 2 days ago I was  
>> offered
>> an advice on the other side of the spectrum by Michael: he notes  
>> that a
>> lot of important things are falling through the cracks because nobody
>> organizes the available resources.  His suggestion is to introduce  
>> real
>> project management into the game, which is basically what David's
>> Projects idea seems to bring.
>
> For the record, I consider my puny efforts to offer more support for  
> Martin's
> and Greg's remarks than for David's.
>
> (The analysis is simply that our current situation is unsurprising  
> given the
> facts that, first, SL seems to consist more of leaders than of  
> followers and
> second, that there seems to be a real dearth of people who care more  
> about
> getting other people unstuck than about making progress on their own  
> pet
> projects.)
>
> (Though, obviously, I'm more guilty than most here.)
>
>> A meta-comment on your post: you don't need to apologize and be shy  
>> for
>> offering your criticism, no matter how many people will disagree with
>> you.
>
> Actually, he does need to apologize and to be shy because doing so  
> makes it
> easier for folks to hear what he's trying to say.
>
> (In our current environment, it works rather similarly to good-cop/ 
> bad-cop.)
>
>> I recently got useful criticism from Bemasc, Christoph and Daniel on
>> #sugar regarding our relationship with Deployments.  Their feeling is
>> that we didn't do enough to get them involved, mine is that our  
>> efforts
>> to reach out have been largely unsuccessful for reasons I do not  
>> fully
>> understand.
>
> Here's another reason for you to consider:
>
> I have come to believe that many people involved in deployments have  
> *learned*
> that they're not going to get anything useful out of interacting  
> with SL
> because:
>
> 1. SL has largely ignored the feedback supplied by these deployments  
> in
> 2007-2008 and exhaustively documented by Greg Smith and S Page at
>
>   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Roadmap

Wow, blast from the past :-) Actually I'd strongly disagree here.  
Having re-read through most of what is listed here, much progress has  
been made on a large number (dare I say majority) of these items! The  
problem is that you need to to be using 0.84 to benefit from most,  
with the approaching 0.86 solving a bunch more.

The difficulty, unfortunately, seems to be much more about getting  
XO-1 QA'ed release rollouts available for deployments. At least 0.84  
does seem to be in the OLPC pipeline, due to XO-1.5 needs, with  
volunteers*** pushing on the side of existing XO-1 hardware.

***F11_for_XO-1 build 5, from Steven Parish, was the last available  
dev release, and is running pretty well on an XO-1 and an XO-B4 here.

Regards,
--Gary

> and also because
>
> 2. most members of SL express comparatively little interest in  
> developing
> seriously for the XO-1 and for the specific network, cognitive, and  
> logistics
> resources of of these deployments.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
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