[Sugar-devel] R&D vs Product Support

[David Farning]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Bernie Innocenti's message of Thu Jun 17 22:56:27 +0000 2010:
>
> [R&D vs. "Finished Product"]
>> Every time I see a hypothetical design blocking the delivery of a quick
>> & effective solution available today, I think that we should rethink our
>> project structure to minimize this tension. Ensuring that the proper
>> design will eventually be implemented is as important as delivering a
>> sufficiently polished product to our current user base. It seems that
>> the two approaches should proceed in parallel.
>
> +5 on everything you wrote.
> FWIW, this doesn't necessarily mean we have two disjunct teams. Like I am
> working on both the version support branch and current bug fix currently,
> there will (and should!) be some overlap between those doing R&D and those
> polishing the result.

For Activity Central I am going to take a slightly different approach.
 Following Mayo hospital (and google) I am going to ask Activity
central employees to spend 60% of their time on directed (revenue
generating) tasks.  The remaining 40% of their time will be 'upstream
time' to work on anything they want to in the Netbook, Linux, Sugar,
Content stack.

The notion is that: a) it attracts the type of people we want. b) it
builds the ecosystem. and c) by working upstream on some things and
downstream on others it helps people internalize the upstream
downstream tensions.

I still have to convince AC's various partners that this plan is a
good use of their limited resources:(

david