[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] community influence on development

[Tomeu Vizoso]

[adding IAEP to cc]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:39, Daniel Drake<dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> quoting Tomeu from another thread (with no bad feelings at all):
>
> "Sugar Labs has currently no resources to focus on anything, it
> depends on volunteers doing whatever they want. I chose to spend my
> time to make easier for more people to bring their knowledge and
> experience to Sugar and the community has no say on this."
>
> Perfectly reasonable answer and this kind of development model works
> well for open source projects, including this one. However, I feel
> like it could be better if the community (who I might even stretch to
> call "customers") could have more influence.
>
> so..to create an open thread:
>
> What are the options for the community having more of an influence here?
> One would be to somehow get sugarlabs to hire people, and somehow
> process "customer" feedback and assign technical tasks to payroll
> developers. Are there others?

Yes, if deployers make very clear what is a priority for them and do
so in a compelling way, I'm sure volunteer developers will make their
plans accordingly.

The feature proposal process is a start on this, we need to improve it
until the features in each release reflect what is needed from the
field.

> Having now visited 3 large deployments I feel frustrated that most of
> the features and changes entering sugar are not increasing
> deployability or increasing the educational impact of the platform.
> General technical and usability improvements are always needed (and
> are always of value) but I feel that the balance is wrong and I feel
> that I have not been very successful in getting community members to
> understand the needs of deployments.

Agreed, though when developers ask for feedback on the mailing list,
they get often no replies. And when we get replies, are from fellow
"hobbyist developers" which have no better insight on what the users
actually need so some bike shedding ensures.

I think this topic is really big for SLs, thanks for bringing it in.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Daniel
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>