[Sugar-devel] Public vs Private, for GSoC mentors and participants

[James Cameron]

As release manager for Sugar, my goal is to maximise the contributions
so that Sugar is improved.

At this time there is a risk of mistakes due to groupthink.

Especially so as we have four participants working on two of the same
Sugar Labs projects; Rudra and Vipul on migration, and Rahul and Anmol
on porting to Python 3.

Therefore, please keep separate your GSoC project management and
mentoring from the Sugar Labs projects.

When any of you begin to discuss a topic, first decide whether the
topic is private to a GSoC project, or is instead best for the
wider audience of the Sugar Labs project.  If you're not sure, ask.


Topics that should be public;

- which work must be done before other work, for technical reasons,

- release plans,

- patch reviews,

- testing,

- regressions,

- coordinating with other people working on the same project.


Topics that can be private;

- coordinating meetings with mentors,

- exactly when you plan to do something; your project schedule,

- planned absences,

- assessment of progress,

- decisions to invest in learning new technologies,

- clearly embarrassing questions.


Hope you can see that these private topics have no direct relation to
the Sugar Labs projects.

For projects directly affecting Sugar (such as migration, porting to
Python 3, porting to GTK+ 3) our weekly developers meeting can be used
for synchronous discussions.

Our mailing list sugar-devel@ and GitHub should be used for
asynchronous discussions.

This subtlety is intended to strengthen community.  The temptation to
act in private should be resisted.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/