[IAEP] Unmaintained Projects and Teams

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 01:02, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> El Thu, 01-07-2010 a las 11:29 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso escribió:
>
>> So that could be what defines a project, but which are the
>> consequences of becoming an official project? I would say that it
>> means that SLs as a community accepts some responsibility about the
>> goals of the project. That could mean that the marketing,
>> localization, infrastructure, development, community, etc. teams are
>> supposed to cater for the needs of each project.
>
> I wish we could offer a quality assurance on anything we do, but we
> can't. We have no budget for any project and resources can disappear at
> any time without advance notice. SoaS is no exception.
>
> Perhaps we could agree to remove projects from the side-bar once it
> looks like the maintainer(s) went MIA and things are bitrotting.
>
> Speaking of which, we also have plenty of dead teams listed in our
> side-bar. Someone made this sarcastic comment: "Sugar Labs seems to have
> more teams than contributors". It hurts because it's true :-(
>
> Proposal: draw a list of teams that should be hidden in some "Disbanded
> Teams" page. Or, to put it positively, "Teams Awaiting Coordinators".
> At the top of the team page, we could add a template saying "This team
> is looking for a coordinator, ask inside". How does it sound?

Sounds great! Everything that gives more visibility to the resourcing
problem is of great importance to SLs today.

>> What will help more to the Sugar ecosystem: a big organization that is
>> willing to take care of everything related to Sugar or several
>> organizations focused on their aspects of their choose?
>
> The second, of course. But do these organizations have to hide their
> projects in some obscure website, away from the eyes of the wider Sugar
> community?

Sure not, but we need to take into account that we may not be able to
highlight 60 projects, a more realistic number would be 6? But I leave
this subject for our community team ;)

> Red Hat and Canonical got into the habit of showcasing their top
> projects on freedesktop.org, gnome.org, kernel.org and similar umbrella
> organizations.

Not sure I get this. You mean that they sponsor projects in those
upstream orgs and capitalize it in terms of marketing?

>> I don't think this is an easy decision without precognition powers,
>> but I'm worried about SLs losing focus.
>
> Organizations like as are rarely good at maintaining focus. Communities
> are good at brainstorming and trying new ways. Synthesis and polish are
> the specialty of businesses and organizations ran like a business. But
> these organizations are often bad at attracting volunteers and getting
> the best out of them.

I guess we need to find the best balance for us. Organizations whose
primary goal is supporting an upstream project use to have very clear
that they shouldn't get into the downstream waters (no pun intended).
I'm thinking of GNOME, KDE, LXDE, etc.

Some links for comparison:

* http://lxde.org/download - points to Debian images (but without
making it too explicit)

* http://www.kde.org/download/ - links to distros carrying KDE

* http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/#rninstallation -
promotes "GNOME Live Media" for trying it out, points to distros for
actual usage. GNOME Live Media is based on Foresight Linux but it's
not explicitly mentioned.

What I conclude from that is that upstream projects understand the
need to make as easy as possible for people to try out their stuff,
which leads to some contributors of both that upstream and of some
distro to make customized images. Though I don't see no upstream
project taking a distro and optimizing it for a specific piece of
hardware, I guess Sugar's situation is special enough in this aspect.
For SLs' is critical that our software runs as well as possible on
OLPC machines.

I think we can improve a lot the experience of people willing to try
out Sugar by checking out those links and see what we can improve.

> With OLPC, Paraguay Educa and Activity Central, we already have 3
> business-like players working on making Sugar a finished product that
> can be given to users. I wish we could invite more of these companies to
> work on making Sugar a great product.

Wonder when someone will start a LTSP-ready spin for schools with computer labs.

> If, instead, we try to be *both* a community and a business within the
> same organization, we may end up being schizophrenic. Could this be a
> variation of the Innovator's Dilemma?

Sure, I'm in favour of trimming out the non-essential goals and
looking at similar organizations for models. But I also see the point
that it may be in our interest to nurture the broadest interests
around Sugar. Crazy idea: what about an incubation lab for projects
that don't fit 100% and that haven't grown yet to have their own
organization?

Regards,

Tomeu

> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
>