[IAEP] Communicating project goals and Roadmap

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 17:06, Sean DALY<sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tomeo, the essence of what I am saying is: the development team should
> chart a course and stay on it (time-based releases seem to be working
> well), and the downstream distros (particularly XO-1.5 and SoaS) then
> the marketing team should take it from there. Which mustn't preclude
> feedback from the field making its way back to the development team
> too. It's when the teams aren't on the same page that we encounter
> difficulties. Wouldn't consulting with the SLOBs be a reasonable form
> of insurance?

Well, David's proposal seemed to be that the SLOBs would set the
dates, not just consulting. Also, IMO, the SLOBs should get consulted
only when there's a conflict. That is, when the normal and broad
communication means have failed to create the needed consensus.

I would like to make three points clear:

- an open source project is only as successful as its downstreams are,
as those are the people that get their work in the hands of people,

- most of the contributors involved in a subproject/team are also
involved in other teams,

- while in a company managers bear the responsibility that the managed
people make an useful use of their time, in non-profits each volunteer
is responsible for that task. When a group of people start telling how
others should spend their free time, they put themselves in a very
dangerous position.

So this is not about defending territory, but about defending a way of
working together that I think has been proven.

As a smaller point, several contributors in the development team
started by packaging Sugar for their favorite distros. So I wouldn't
help distros only based on their capability of directly delivering
Sugar to children, there's more value to it.

As I said, your plans for the marketing team sound great to me, how
can the development team better help you reach those goals?

Regards,

Tomeu