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: <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability</a> 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. <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Daniel Drake <<a href="mailto:dsd@laptop.org">dsd@laptop.org</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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?</blockquote><div> -> 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. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 </blockquote><div> </div><div>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. <ol><li>Deployments to give feedback to SugarLabs</li><li>Sugar Community to process that feedback in a way that allows them to understand the needs of the Deployments</li> <li>Sugar Community to create a technical plans/projects for meeting those needs </li><li>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</li> </ol> Looking at the issues here: <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sugar_on_a_Stick_Improve_Deployability</a> - 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. <ul> <li><h3>Sticks are dieing a lot - Make sticks more robust</h3></li><li><h3> What is a reasonable expectation for the role of the XS in Sugar on a Stick deployments in the next 6 months?</h3> </li><li><h3>Collaboration is unreliable and thus frustrating</h3></li><li><h3>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. </h3> </li></ul>Only a few are stuck at 4, where there are some clear tasks but no one has actually done them yet. <ul><li><h3>Make it easier for a teacher or school to customize a spin and then copy it for a hundred kids - </h3></li><li><h3>Using a CD helper takes a lot of prep time before and after class - (creating a floppy helper)</h3></li></ul>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. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Daniel _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org">Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel</a> </blockquote></div> -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax