[IAEP] sustaining development

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:51, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 09:30:20AM +0000, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 09:16:10AM +0000, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > I'm totally n00b in such field and sorry if I'm talking about obvious
>> > things but what I have in my mind is organizing sufficient
>> > infrastructure/place/rules/schedules to let various developers meet
>> > various deployments needs.
>> >
>> > It could be like a bank of deployment needs, some needs could be payed
>> > some not, some came from individuals(who is going to pay or not) some
>> > from small/large deployments, from non-profit and for-profit
>> > organizations etc. It's not only about founding developers(via payed
>> > needs) but it has such benefit.
>>
>> In my mind such place(which could be represented in the web by special site)
>> would be core point of sugar community, at the end all we have is
>> someone needs. It could be good point to start for newcomers and let us
>> flexibly organize sugar development process in social(not technical) and
>> deployment cases.
>
> Does someone have successful examples of such efforts, we could borrow
> their infrastructure/web-engine/etc. ?
>
> I think web portal should have low borders for regular
> users(individuals) and shouldn't be tied to development resources(at the
> end we can have just links to track/git/etc). Of course we already have
> sufficient resources like wiki/launchpad/track but they either too
> common or too unpredictable for non-developers. For example why we
> decided to use ASLO instead of using plain ftp or wiki pages ala
> laptop.org.

Yes, I think something like this could work, there exist already sites
devoted to put together freelancers and employers, though in our case
I think that an employer would do well by contracting with someone who
has already some status in the community, there's a good discussion in
this chapter of Producing OSS:

http://producingoss.com/en/money.html

In the particular case of OLPC deployments, my impression is that they
(sensibly) want to create local capacity, so they would prefer that
their people do the actual work. The problem we face is that coding
the feature is just part of the job, there needs to be maintainers,
team coordinators, a QA team, etc. Also, some tasks require some
specialized knowledge in some area that would take too long to create
locally.

What Michael said about non-feature work being carried by volunteers
on their free time could work up to some point if we had that work
very well distributed among lots of people with excellent
communication between them and with good processes to coordinate their
work. We are not there yet.

If we get more realistic and look at existing projects such as GNOME,
companies employ people who have taken responsibilities such as module
maintenance and team coordination. That's how companies get to
influence overall development of the project. See the link above for a
better explanation of how this works.

My hope is that once deployers have contributed some features and
their employees have gotten more acquainted with this development
model, that they will take a step forward and accept those
responsibilities. My concern is that this can take too long and the
people with the best knowledge of Sugar may have had to move away
before then.

Regards,

Tomeu

>> > On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 05:26:49PM +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
>> > > Hi all,
>> > >
>> > > as you may know (specially if you have read my last blog posts) these
>> > > days I'm quite happy at how big users of Sugar such as OLPC
>> > > deployments and also OLPC itself are starting to do their Sugar work
>> > > inside the Sugar Labs community, instead of doing it on their own and
>> > > keeping the results for themselves.
>> > >
>> > > While I think this is a big step forward towards sustainability of
>> > > Sugar development, I'm still concerned about the not-so-long-term
>> > > future because there's a good amount of work that needs to be done so
>> > > that new Sugar releases are made with consistent quality and that work
>> > > is being done by volunteers, funding it with their savings. When those
>> > > savings end, there will be no place where deployers and volunteers
>> > > could share their work.
>> > >
>> > > We could put it as if we had covered the need of funding new features,
>> > > but we still are depending precariously on the good will of a few in
>> > > order to sustain the process through which new features reach
>> > > children. My questions is, how can we reach sustainability on the rest
>> > > of the process?
>> > >
>> > > Thanks,
>> > >
>> > > Tomeu
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
>> > > What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
>> > > Farning
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> > > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> > >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Aleksey
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Aleksey
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
> --
> Aleksey
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
«Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
Farning