This seems like a cool teachable moment if you are interested in learning more about learning theory and vocabulary.<br><br>The Sugar community is a Community of Practice CoP - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice</a><br>
<br>The feedback of the Olin people is on inadequacy of the "legitimate peripheral participation" that is not having a clear path for people to participate at the margins of the group then move in. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_peripheral_participation</a><br>
<br>How to use IRC is Tacit Knowledge (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge</a>) for an open source developer. So one of the ways we help people is turn it into Explicit Knowledge by explaining what it is and how to use.<br>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tomeu@tomeuvizoso.net" target="_blank">tomeu@tomeuvizoso.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi, this is awesome feedback. I'm going to speak from the SugarLabs perspective.<br>
<div><br>
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Elsa Culler <<a href="mailto:eculler@gmail.com" target="_blank">eculler@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Hi,<br>
><br>
> Last night at sugarcamp, we(people from the Olin college OLPC chapter) were<br>
> asked to come up with a list of roadblocks we have run into in trying to<br>
> volunteer effectively. Mel Chua asked me to forward it to these lists, so<br>
> here is the list in text format:<br>
><br>
> we have to come up with jobs ourselves, and we're not too good at it<br>
><br>
> we don't know what we can do that is useful<br>
><br>
> when we are told what to do, we have to check with other people to make sure<br>
> it's ok<br>
<br>
</div>Point taken, we need to come up with a good list of interesting things<br>
that people can start with. Somewhat related, I keep up a TODO list of<br>
things in <a href="http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tomeu" target="_blank">http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tomeu</a> that interested people<br>
can take from my hands. Wonder how we could make this more<br>
discoverable?<br>
<div><br>
> we don't have easy access to cool things that are going on in OLPC that<br>
> would get people excited<br>
><br>
> -for example - it would make people excited just to hear accounts of<br>
> deployments<br>
<br>
</div>Could you check out the weekly newsletter published in Walter's blog<br>
(<a href="http://walterbender.org/" target="_blank">http://walterbender.org/</a>) and see how much it suits your needs?<br>
SugarLabs cannot say much about OLPC deployments, but we hope to have<br>
pilots of our own soon, and hopefully deployments will follow.<br>
<div><br>
> most meetings happen when we are in class and we don't know what happened or<br>
> give input<br>
><br>
> - especially with commute (it takes us 1;30 hrs to get here)<br>
<br>
</div>Most SugarLabs meetings happen on IRC, so you wouldn't have the<br>
commute issue. Please check out the meeting announcements in the<br>
sugar-devel and iaep mailing lists and comment if the times don't work<br>
out for you, we probably can change them.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/</a><br>
<div><br>
> it's difficult to find out what OLPC does beyond the broad mission-statement<br>
> sort of thing<br>
<br>
</div>Probably, SL could do better as well, can you comment about what's<br>
missing in Walter's newsletter?<br>
<div><br>
> it took me 6 months to figure out how to use irc, i still don't know where<br>
> trac is<br>
<br>
</div>Definitely a problem. We are thinking about having a landing page<br>
similar to the one in <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/" target="_blank">http://www.eclipse.org/</a> that hopefully will give<br>
a way for everybody to find how to better interact with us depending<br>
on their role. The idea is that a prospecting developer would just<br>
click on one of those icons and would find a simple explanation of the<br>
first concepts that need to be grabbed in order to move forward. How<br>
does that sound?<br>
<div><br>
> olpc-dev list emails are kind of over my head<br>
<br>
</div>Yeah, we should understand better this issue. Is a coder-newbies<br>
mailing list a valid suggestion?<br>
<div><br>
> where are things? (on wiki, etc)<br>
<br>
</div>David Farning is working on this, following a never ending list of<br>
complaints from Greg DeKoenigsberg.<br>
<div><br>
> note - if you teach us how stuff works we can tell more people/translate the<br>
> information<br>
<br>
</div>Totally, we count on you to help us, we are totally aware that by<br>
ourselves cannot do it.<br>
<div><br>
> I would like to develop activities, but up until now I didn't even know it<br>
> was up for grabs<br>
<br>
</div>Ooops ;)<br>
<br>
> Thanks for listening!<br>
<br>
Thanks to you, this definitely helps.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Tomeu<br>
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</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Caroline Meeks<br>Solution Grove<br>Caroline@SolutionGrove.com<br><br>617-500-3488 - Office<br>505-213-3268 - Fax<br>