[IAEP] (engineering) capacity building

[David Farning]

Truly inspiring thread:)

It looks like everyone participating in this thread is coming to the
same conclusion using examples and models derived from their own
experiences and personalities.  I am pretty sure there is an education
theory about that....

That conclusion is contributor _impact_.

Of the successful not-for-profits and community organizations I have
studied, one of the common threads is a near maniacal emphasis on the
importance of contributors feeling the impact of their contribution on
the project.

Caroline, being Caroline, makes a list of list of high impact tasks
and starts recruiting people for those task.  This approach not only
solves the identified task.  It identifies and engages contributors
with important skills.  The stickiness of these contributors will be
high. Their early contact with the project with be fulfilling due to
the high impact nature of their initial contribution.

Christoph and Bastien, the writers, notes that the productivity of new
contributors is enhanced by good documentation.  Good documentation
reduces that learning curve for potential contributors.  A participant
who can sit down, create a simple activity, and upload it to the
activities portal in an evening is much more likely to contribute
again.

One can feel the _impact_ of writing and uploading an activity.
Wading through wiki pages is not particularly fulfilling.

Tomeu does a cost benefit analysis. (Is the cost of including and
maintain this code worth the benefit it provides?)  He notes that it
_can_ be frustrating to engage participants who are not able to
contribute in a meaning full way.  The potential contributor wants to
help but _may_ not be able figure out how.  Existing contributors
_may_ get frustrated because they feel they are using a
disproportionate amount of their time working with new contributors.
He cautions toward stacking the deck with new contributors who are
likely to make high impact contributions quickly.  This is fulfilling
for both the new participate and the mentor.

This is not to say that saturation recruitment (is that a valid term?)
is bad.  But, it is important to create on-ramps (such as the above
documentation) and processes to insure that the signal-to-noise ratio
of new participants is manageable.

Sean tries to tie these themes together into the consistent and
comprehensive Sugar Labs message.  It is interesting to note that from
a marketing pov he emphasizes that it is easier to attract and engage
contributors in a project with high viability and value.

Everyone feel pride in their first kernel patch.  Many people spend
tens and even hundreds of hours on white space changes just to improve
code readability:)

As long as we focus on the common theme of 'increasing the impact' of
contributors, the community will continue to grow.

While these examples have been developer focused, the same themes
apply to engaging contributors in the deployment and teaching areas of
the project.

david

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:57 AM, Sean DALY<sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I wasn't thinking either of posting articles about recruitment on
>> those places, rather to get our organization known. Most of the people
>> that know that Sugar exists think we are part of OLPC, or that we have
>> funding and a paid development team or that we have abandoned the OLPC
>> cause and are focusing on the "rich kids".
>>
>> Once FLOSS people know that we are a global grassroots organization
>> working on an exciting technology that can have a bigger impact that
>> any consumer product, we'll be in a much better position for asking
>> for help.
>>
>
> Well, there's no difference between getting Sugar Labs known and
> getting Sugar Labs known; there's just the question of targeting and
> how we go about it. The hard part of marketing is keeping the message
> clear, consistent, understandable, and attractive, then repeating it a
> zillion times in a million ways until it sinks in. In our launches we
> have been targeting tech and education journalists/bloggers and
> education departments/ministries; for now, with few exceptions only
> tech writers have written articles. However, at this point we are
> extremely well referenced in search engines and that's not likely to
> change - we are very easy to find for people who hear about us.
>
> There's no question Sugar has suffered from OLPC's image difficulties,
> but I firmly believe Sugar's success is good for OLPC and vice versa.
>
> Visuals and logos are key to raising unaided awareness. What most
> people remember about OLPC is: small $100 laptop with a crank. Many
> journalists and bloggers are unaware how big the installed base is,
> and what countries have massive deployments, and that Windows has not
> gone beyond pilots at this time; most know that the XO runs "Linux",
> without further information (you have to see and touch Sugar to
> understand it). There are several reasons for this, but one is the
> scarcity of XOs outside deployments. Even single loaner machines are
> not as effective as they could be, because it's the networking and
> collaboration that demonstrates Sugar's effectiveness.
>
> The press and blogs are a very efficient way of becoming known since
> they are indexed and findable. We have had excellent coverage in the
> specialized tech press, some excellent coverage in the mainstream tech
> press, a small bit of coverage in the mainstream press, and no
> coverage in the education press that I know of. In the press releases
> (which are often digested verbatim in the press) we always say we are
> a nonprofit and the About section tells the story (we added Local Labs
> in the last PR footer), but even with that, many journalists in a
> hurry call us a company.
>
> Our website is an organic hodgepodge people get lost in and although
> we are nearly ready to mitigate the most serious navigation problems
> with the sitewide navbar, beyond that (and optimizing certain key
> pages) I don't advocate investing energy redoing our site at this
> time. With one exception: I support the suggestion of letting people
> "try" Sugar online. This could have major impact in allowing people to
> see and "touch" Sugar and, closely associated with the Sugar on a
> Stick download and install, and documentation including curricula
> support, could multiply our reach by exciting curiosity. Perhaps a
> design project for the SoaS v2 release?
>
> I don't think anyone who attended LinuxTag missed the Sugar Labs
> booth; it was an efficient way for many developers to see and touch
> Sugar. I had a table full of both XOs and netbooks (
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/39656470@N02/3666862229/ ), everyone was
> curious about the XO. Since March we've had three articles in Ars
> Technica, two in LWN, Slashdot, etc.; there are a great many FOSS
> projects who have more users but less exposure. There's always a way
> to do better, but I'm not sure what we can do beyond what's already
> being done plus placing blog posts/IRC into the mix?
>
> Sean
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
David Farning
Sugar Labs
www.sugarlabs.org