[Sugar-devel] cookie licker

[David Farning]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 1:10 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> There's both a pattern and an anti-pattern here, and I saw both during
> my "OLPC v1" days, circa 2008.  There were certain features that we
> were assured had a brilliant and complicated design that was just
> waiting to be implemented.... and the implementer never got around to
> either documenting the design or implementing it.  There were other
> features that got reimplemented several different times in equally-bad
> ways because no one involved would take the time to get all the
> stakeholders together and have a good discussion before charging off
> to do something.  The results were short-sighted solutions to one
> person's view which ignored broader context.
>
> Debian has it right here -- everyone is encouraged to adopt
> unmaintained projects, no stigma attached -- but there's *also* a
> definite communication process beforehand which attempts to survey the
> stakeholders and ensure that people don't go charging off blindly.
>
> I don't know to what degree these two sides of the pendulum exist in
> our present community.  At EduJam I saw a lot of
> communication-before-implementation, which is good, and I didn't see
> any territoriality about projects.  For my part I was attempting to
> participate in the Journal discussions with a big "but I don't have
> time to implement this!" disclaimer to avoid any appearance that I was
> "licking the cookie".  So things seem good (in my limited view).

+1 The structure of EduJAM tried to take this into account. We took
precautions to discourage that neither OLPC-F, OLPC-A, Plan Ceibal,
nor Activity Central presented organizational design roadmaps about
where sugar or the OS 'should' going.

Instead the format went:
1. Tour of schools.
2. Meet and greet.
3. General deployment discussions.
4. Specific development issue discussions.
5. Group hack time

The intended work flow was:
1. Establish shared goals
2. Establish shared relationships
3. Refine shared goals
4. Discuss specific implementation of refine (yet shared) goals
5. Implement specific goals.

Based on the recent threads in olpc-devel and sugar-develop the
results have positive so far.

david

We are looking at sponsoring an 'education practitioner' focused event
in 5 to 6 month that follows the same general work flow.

> But it's certainly worth keeping both sides of the danger in mind.
> And now we have a clever name for half of it.  (I have a name I use
> for the other half, too, but I shouldn't post it on a public list. ;-)
>  --scott
>
> --
>       ( http://cscott.net )
>