[IAEP] Sugar Labs - Directions of Growth

[David Farning]

Over the last couple of weeks we have been talking about how to grow Sugar Labs.

Without looking at specific solutions, I would like to think about
framing Sugar Labs growth in three directions:
1. Improve and stabilize the learning platform.
2. Grow towards the student.
3. Increase reach and impact.

Growing in these directions will help Sugar Labs accomplish its
mission.  But, hand in hand with growth we must think about how our
structure as a community based projects affects that growth.

The two most important factors driving growth in a community project are:
1.  A _product_ that is valuable enough for others to test, use, and improve.
2.  A _project_ that encourages users to test, use, improve, and
participate in the project by sharing their improvements with the
project.

'Users' is a wide term.  In the case of Sugar Labs, it can range from
individuals, to companies, to national governments.  Anyone who takes
a Sugar deliverable and builds on it to help someone learn is a user.

To take a step back, we can think of adding value to Sugar Labs.  But,
what is value? There are many definitions of value in a project such
as Sugar Labs:
Quality of code.
Number of users.
Number of headlines.
Compliance to specific teaching pedagogies.
....

The notion of  value that I tend to looks at, from a 50,000 feet, is
'How does Sugar Labs create a large pool of users -- who benefit
enough from using Sugar -- that they, and others, are willing to
invest in improving Sugar'?

As a rough model we can think of value as Educational Excellence(X),
Technical Excellence(Y) and Reach and Impact(Z).

Growth towards educational excellence represents extending the core
product towards the learner.  Possible steps include:

Stable learning platform.
Easy distribution mechanism -- the shift from ./configure; make; make
to [rpm|apt-get] install .... was huge.
Easy deployment process.
Creation of base learning activities/content.
Creation of specific learning curriculum to meet specific teaching needs.

Going down this list, the groups involved involved tend to shift from
developers to practicing educators.  We need to think of growing to
include educators rather than crowding out developers.  As we move
towards the right along the x-asis, each prior stage grows and
improves along the y-axis

In the larger context of adding value to the project, we can
think of project visibility and desirability along the z-axis .  As
the product grows towards the user and the quality of the product
increases, the
marketing team is able to increase the visibility and desirability
(z-axis) of the product and project to more and more people.

Another way to look at this, is to examine how a tree grows:)

Tree growth is most easily measured in how much taller or wider the
tree become as a result of linear grow of the trunk or branches. In
addition to growing in length, new branches grow off of the trunk or
existing branches.  As the length and number of the branches increase,
the trunk and branches increase in width to provide both physical
support and enough pores to transport water from the root to the
leaves and transport energy from the leave to the roots.

In this analogy, the length of the branches can represent market
penetration.  Sugar must become useful enough to penetrate deeply into
the learning occurring at individual schools.  As Sugar penetrates in
to individual schools, those efforts can be "branched" to migrate
sugar into additional schools.

Finally, the education, deployment, development, and support teams
must grow proportionally to support the deployments while pulling the
ideas and
improvements from the schools back up stream.

david
-- 
David Farning
Sugar Labs
www.sugarlabs.org