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

[Walter Bender]

Apologies for jumping back to the beginning of the thread. Daniel
makes some good point here on a theme that have been raised repeatedly
over the lifetimes of both the Sugar project and OLPC.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:39 AM, 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?
>
>

Short term, it seems we should be amplifying what does work: we have a
vibrant developer community in IRC that is extremely responsive. Is
there some way to get more deployment feedback directly into that
channel?

Mid term, we had had some discussions about how to organize small
teams of teachers (deployers) a while back, where we designated a role
for liaison. Getting these liaisons to participate in the mailing
lists (sur and iaep) would be a start.

Long term, having a more formal mechanism may be useful. A person
designated to the role of liaison to deployments. But I would hope we
could come up with a more distributed model, which has no single point
of failure. Local Labs should be part of the solution as well.

In the meanwhile, following Caroline and Greg's lead re Sugar on a
Stick, those of you who don't feel you are being heard, please make
pages in the wiki (and file tickets in trac.). Give us a head ups re
your concerns on iaep or sur. Join the community. Maybe someone more
deployment oriented should run for the Oversight Board to ensure we
have better representation there
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance/Oversight_Board/2009-2010-candidates).

> 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.

Daniel, could you start the ball rolling by being more explicit about
some specific unmet needs of deployments that might be actionable?

thanks.

-walter

--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org