[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Mockup for collab.sugarlabs.org

[Wade Brainerd]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> All mentioned above could be(already) done in existed env. But the major
> idea of collab.sl.o proposal is bringing life to existed scheme by
> stimulating users to share their needs(due to having convenient
> "ASLO for needs" site).

Hi Aleksey,

We definitely need to improve our lines of communication with users
(deployments, teachers, students and casual).  As a programmer I
appreciate a good technical solution to this problem.

I think it's more a personal problem than a tech problem though.  E.g.
we need better relationships between developers and users, more than
we need a better form to fill in.  And that's really a job for the
project leadership, mostly by introducing people and encouraging them
to follow up.  Tomeu's recent visit to Laboratorio Tecnológico del
Uruguay is a great example; if only we could put every Sugar developer
at a deployment for a week.  I joined the sur list and use Google
Translate to feel at least a little bit plugged in :)   Still, I
occasionally send emails to deployments asking things like "Are you
guys using Typing Turtle?" and "What kinds of activities could you
use?" but rarely hear back.  I guess it's a problem when most of the
developers speak one language, and most of the users speak one of many
others.

> I'm personally for lightweight collab.sl.o(to meet only mentioned above
> issues) and reusing existed development related resources like
> wiki/launchpad/mls for development process.

What do you think about making this idea into an activity, instead of
a website?  We could take my "Report a Problem" control panel and turn
it into a "Feedback" activity.  I already have the "log collector"
server set up on SL infrastructure - we could turn the feedback into a
RSS feed for developers who could detect trends.  I'm not sure about
the voting stuff - we hardly get any reviews on ASLO as it is, my
Typing Turtle score is down to 3 stars because of one middle school
kid :)

(BTW, there seems to not be much user representation in the discussion
about 0.88 features, which may provide some motivation for this topic)

-Wade