[IAEP] [Marketing] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 19:29, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Martin is sooo right!  A great focus would be in making SoaS very non-techie
> friendly so that average classroom teachers and parents can use it and share
> it with children.
>
> The number of tech-savvy teachers is pathetically small. The CUE (Computer
> Using Educators) conference early this month had over 1000 attendees out of
> about 307,000 teachers in California! That is a paltry 0.3257%!  And many of
> those attending really were beginners.
>
> These people need the easiest possible entry into the wonderful world of
> Sugar.

I think this thread is more about "how can we do the best we can with
the limited (and shrinking) resources", rather than "what do we wish
SoaS was".

A volunteer-based organization that sustains its operations on a fixed
set of people and doesn't make its priority renewing and growing it is
going to disintegrate soon rather than later, because those people's
energy is being used up and unless the work is very light and is very
evenly distributed, that energy won't be replenished fast enough.

This will be more of a collapse rather than a fading, because as
enthusiast contributors have stepped back during the last months, the
work load has grown on the ones who stayed, and also the result of
their work has become less gratifying. At some point, one of the
remaining fibres will break and the others won't be able to absorb any
more work.

So I would like the Sugar Labs community to look at itself, be proud
of what we have achieved to date, but realize that it needs to change
to a more sustainable model if it wants to keep on. A model in which
it's clear what is being done and what is not being done, in which
people take tasks more often than creates them, in which expectations
are in line with capacity and in which there's no discussion about
doing stuff without discussing who is going to do it.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Caryl
>
>> From: martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>> Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:46:49 -0400
>> To: walter.bender at gmail.com
>> CC: mel at melchua.com; marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org; sdz at sugarlabs.org;
>> pbrobinson at gmail.com; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org; tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net
>> Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on
>> convos in other lists
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > the real intention is
>> > "this is where you start"
>>
>> But... what's the target user for a "this is where you start"? Someone
>> who can make their own spin... there's only very few of those target
>> users, and they can help themselves (IOWs if there isn't a SoaS,
>> they'll yum install sugar-*, set gdm to autologin and they'll be ok).
>> Not many of those users are close to a school.
>>
>> Teachers who want to use SoaS in a classroom... there are lots of
>> them... and they don't want to learn how to make spins. It's usually
>> hard enough to "burn" the USB sticks so that they boot already. And
>> they need many activities to be included, so they can give it to 6 or
>> 7 year olds...
>>
>> Yes, there are some teachers who have a geek sidekick with
>> linux/fedora know-how, but that's a vanishingly small number...
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>>
>> m
>> --
>> martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>> martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>> - ask interesting questions
>> - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
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>