[Sugar-devel] community influence on development

[Caroline Meeks]

Great thread!

Personally I feel very heard by the development team.

I personally don't hear the voice of the XO deployments saying what is
needed for them.  I admit i have limited time and so I focus on things that
are relevent to SoaS but I still would have expected to be interacting with
people from the XO Deployments as we do feature planning for the next
release.  I don't want to be the only deployment voice, the needs of the XO
deployments are important.  This is just meant as feedback, that whatever
channels you are using to communicate your needs and priorities they aren't
reaching me.

I spend a lot of time trying to make the SoaS needs concrete and grounded in
use cases. I make lots of lists, I post them on lots of different lists and
wikis. I put in tickets.

Currently I'm working on making Sugar on a Stick more deployable:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability

What I've noticed about this list is its contains mostly tasks that aren't
within the core competencies of our current development team.  So I think my
strategy will be to try to get the current people to help me define and
explain the tasks then try to recruit some experts in these fields to join
us and help us come up with solutions.  I don't know if it will work, but it
seems worth a try.

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?


-> process "customer" feedback - I think this is very important.

I started a thread on the systems board about whether or not we should try
UserVoices to make it easier for users to give thier feedback.  I'd love it
if you would join that discussion.  I think trac is not suitable for
collecting customer feedback.

>
>
>
> 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 feel
that I have not been very successful in getting community members to
understand the needs of deployments.

+1, how can we help you be more



So to take a process view what we need is.


   1. Deployments to give feedback to SugarLabs
   2. Sugar Community to process that feedback in a way that allows them to
   understand the needs of the Deployments
   3. Sugar Community to create a technical plans/projects for meeting those
   needs
   4. Volunteer developers to change what they work on in response to the
   needs of the deployments and/or new volunteers entering the community to
   work on these needs


Looking at the issues here:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability-
Mostly they are stuck at Step 3.

Stuck at 3 - We don't have a good plan for solving the problem or to put it
another way, we don't technically understand the issues well enough to know
the right way, or sometimes anyway, to fix them.


   - Sticks are dieing a lot - Make sticks more robust
   - What is a reasonable expectation for the role of the XS in Sugar on a
   Stick deployments in the next 6 months?
   - Collaboration is unreliable and thus frustrating
   - Using a CD helper takes a lot of prep time before and after class (to
   the extent we need to change the format of the files on the USB we don't
   have a solid plan yet.

Only a few are stuck at 4, where there are some clear tasks but no one has
actually done them yet.


   - Make it easier for a teacher or school to customize a spin and then
   copy it for a hundred kids -
   - Using a CD helper takes a lot of prep time before and after class -
   (creating a floppy helper)

So from my experience the bottle neck is figuring out how to solve the
problems.  Do you have a list of high priority problems that you could do a
similar analysis on? It would be interesting to see what the similarity and
differences are.


>
> Daniel
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>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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