Greg, Thanks for taking the time to put together the well though out list of concrete improvement that we can make to the wiki. First the credit.  I idea of teams came from SJ while we were discussing the relationship between the SL and OLPC wikis.  I was talking about the _best_ place to host different content.  SJ suggested that their was not a best place.  Rather, he stated a lot of content fits in both places, just from different _perspectives_. Hence, the idea of teams or sub communities tackling the Sugar Labs mission from different angles. On stubs.  A wiki is an interesting collaborative tool.  The wiki's value is ultimately as a source of information for readers.  Here we get to the tricky part.  The wiki is of little value as a source of information until it contains substantive, well written, and easily located articles.  But, nobody wants to go through the bother of researching, writing, and organizing the content until they feel there work would have an impact on future readers. Several community theorists advocate 'worse is better' as a starting point for generating initial content.  As long as a community starts with 'something', that something can gradually improve until it becomes something useful. FWIW, when we help the initial wiki barn raising about 6 months ago, we were averaging (very roughly) about 2 wiki contributions per day.  Now we are up to about 10 per day.  If we can stay on that rate of increase, we will exceed 40 contributions per day in another 6 months. thanks david <div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Greg Dekoenigsberg <<a href="mailto:gdk@redhat.com" target="_blank">gdk@redhat.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I love the idea of teams.  Teams working together are awesome.  Teams share a common goal.  Teams hold one another accountable.  Go Team! So we've got a list of teams on the left navbar of the Sugar wiki (and one or two elsewhere).  I figured I'd check them all out and give my unsolicited feedback.  Since that's what I do.  ;) === GENERAL OBSERVATIONS: * Having every team work mostly the same way is *really* useful.  It allows volunteers to move comfortably from team to team.  Seems like the common structure indicates that folks kinda get that already. * Every team needs a leader.  Whether it's a coach or just a star player, it helps newcomers *tremendously* to know who the Go-To person is.  At the very least, it should be immediately clear, from the very first page, who is accountable for moving this team forward.  It is *frequently* unclear currently who's leading a team. * Every team needs a goal.  What's the purpose of your team?  What problem are you trying to solve?  It really helps to make these goals *simple* and *explicit*. * Every team needs meetings.  It really helps to relate with your teammates real-time, even if it's just on IRC.  To that end, I think that a "MEETINGS" tab should be added to the Team Template pages.  Most of the functional teams currently have meeting pages, fwiw. * Every team needs a TODO list, and it's part of the template, which is nice -- but what good is a TODO list if there aren't names and dates associated with it? * I love the generic structure of the team pages -- but the details are still somewhat lacking in most cases.  :) === SPECIFIC TEAM OBSERVATIONS: <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/AccessibiltyTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/AccessibiltyTeam</a> ---------------------------------------- Ouch.  A link to a wiki that doesn't load, and nothing but blank stub pages. Even the URL has a speling errur.  WHO'S THE COACH? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/BuildTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/BuildTeam</a> --------------------------------- Ouch again.  All empty stubs.  WHO'S THE COACH? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam</a> -------------------------------------- Ah, a bit better.  The home page is full of useful information, including meeting times, minutes, and a list of team members.  That's great! Judging from the minutes, though, it looks like the meeting was attended by two members in early October, perhaps not held in mid-October, and no meeting has yet been scheduled for November at all.  Is everything okay with this team?  Looks like Walter Bender is the coach here.  Is Walter overextended?  Can someone else step up and lead this team?  Or are we considering ditching this team altogether in favor of a LoCo model? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/DesignTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/DesignTeam</a> ---------------------------------- A bit of info, but looks like it hasn't taken off yet.  Most of the pages are stubs.  If I had to guess, looks like Eben Eliason is the coach here, amirite? Seems as though there's been one meeting since September, is that true?  Have there been meetings since?  Even if producing formal minutes is painful, maybe post IRC logs? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam</a> --------------------------------------- The most developed, which is not at all surprising, I guess.  :)  Clear that Simon and Marco are the leaders here.  Lots of good info on how to participate, lots of links in various states of repair, but that's ok. The meetings page is absolutely brilliant and extremely well-maintained, with agendas, logs and summaries of every meeting for months.  Go Team Go! Curious that the TODO list is empty, though.  :) <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/DocumentationTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/DocumentationTeam</a> ----------------------------------------- It appears as though the stated goal is to work with FLOSS Manuals, rather than creating our own team.  I'm not convinced that this is sufficient. Just because we use the FLOSS Manuals infrastucture (which is very good), that does not imply that Sugar shouldn't have a documentation team.  What work needs to be done?  Who's getting together regularly to assess progress?  Who's the coach -- is it Anne Gentle?  Is it Ed Cherlin?  Is it someone else? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/InfrastructureTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/InfrastructureTeam</a> ------------------------------------------ Lots of good stuff here.  Looks like Bernie is the man here... right, Bernie? Love the links to all supported infrastructure, even though some of them are busted.  The TODO list is good, but again -- no owners, no dates?  And the Getting Involved section is completely empty!  Booooo! When are your meetings? As a side note: IMHO, infrastructure is the *best* way to get geeks involved. There are a ton of bored sysadmins out there, and this kind of work is right up their alley.  This good be a great technial onramp project for Sugarlabs. <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/LocalizationTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/LocalizationTeam</a> ---------------------------------------- Clearly just a stub driving people to the OLPC Localization work, which is probably appropriate for now. <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam</a> ----------------------------------- Lots of good info, contact info is clear.  Are there regular meetings? And the "Getting Involved" section appears to be a Testing page.  I presume that will be deprecated in favor of the actual TestingTeam pages? Is there no other way to get involved in release work? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/TranslationTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/TranslationTeam</a> --------------------------------------- The first page is an *awesome* resource for how to translate wiki pages... so is that the goal?  Getting wiki pages translated?  Maybe this should be a subset of the Wiki team instead?  Or maybe their should be actual separate language teams? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/TestingTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/TestingTeam</a> ----------------------------------- Clearly in progress, clear that dfarning is the owner, the Triage guide is a good start, meetings will help here tremendously, and since that's the one thing on the TODO list, I'd say that's spot on.  :) <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/WikiTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/WikiTeam</a> -------------------------------- Who's the owner... cjl?  The TODO list looks good... names attached? <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/MarketingTeam</a> ------------------------------------- Why isn't it linked from the left nav?  Who's the owner?  Meetings? === That's all for now.  Comments/flames welcome. --g _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </blockquote></div>