[Its.an.education.project] Cleaning up the activities page

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com> wrote:
> Greg speaketh wisdom. The best tool/system/procedure/infrastructure is
>  one that people actually use.

Indeed.

>  I've heard that strawman artifact-examples to play with helps groups
>  move forward (also known as "I can has working code?") so here's an
>  experimental attempt to do so - please hold me to this, and holler if I
>  don't report back in 24 hours.
>
>  (the below is culled from an IRC convo with Bernie)
>
>  what would you think of something like http://trac-hacks.org/ but for
>  .xo and .xol files only? (In other words, Activity and library bundle
>  development, compartmentalized and separated from "core" Sugar code,
>  user docs, etc. - a developers' center.) Let's call this xo-get.org for
>  now, in homage to Chris Hager's awesome Activity.
>
>  The current structure for Activity development, as best as I can tell,
>  is "code in git, (sometimes) tickets in trac, (sometimes) user/teacher
>  docs on the wiki, (rarely) devel documentation on the wiki." This is
>  scattered, unclear, involves lots of manual work... it doesn't seem to
>  be functioning well, or to be a system that people enjoy using.
>
>  xo-get.org would have "code in git, (always) tickets in trac, (always)
>  devel documentation in trac, (hopefully) user docs on the wiki."

User docs need to be packaged for optional user installs. Into git with them.

I don't know what level of devel docs you have in mind here. I would
certainly want API docs to be in git, when we get that far.

I have used code repositories for docs before, and written procedures
for my fellow tech writers on using them. If anybody needs a procedure
written on anything to do with the XO or the OLPC Web site, please
contact me.

We also have to allow for localization/translation of docs. Pootle
doesn't handle this. It has to scale to hundreds, later thousands of
activities, and maybe further; and to several hundred languages.

"It turns out that 347 (or approximately 5%) of the world's languages
have at least one million speakers and account for 94% of the world's
population."
http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size

> The
>  goal would be to make life as easy for Activity developers as humanly
>  possible. Some helpful features...

I volunteered somewhere around here to coordinate documentation
volunteers and to write some docs. I'll take a chunk of this, and try
to redistribute it in a helpful and sustainable manner.

>  (1)  more-easily-sortable "Activities" page - "show me all bundles that
>  work with Sugar's current version," etc.

Dependencies, please.

>  (2) for both people (users) and code (things like the xo-get activity),
>  it will hopefully be easier to find/pull/script/contribute-to things in
>  a more structured resource.
>
>  (3) the grassroots-people structure might find it easier to tweak this
>  tech-tool structure for Activity development facilitation, since the
>  manual work will never end (when something's marked "please test!"
>  someone still has to go find testers, someone has to test it...) Tools
>  that are pleasant to tweak tend to become tools that are pleasant to
>  use, which tend to become tools that are used.
>
>  (4) We'll find out more when we play around with it, I'm sure.
>
>  Right now this is a lot of hypothetical "wouldn't this be nice" talk, so
>  to turn this into action... I'm going to try to set up a strawman/demo
>  trac-hacks like installation late tonight after I get back from 1cc.
>  Advance warning: it will be slow as molasses because my personal
>  webspace is on a shared server. I'll fill it with a few sample uploads
>  of Activity code to give people an idea of what could be done with it.
>
>  So here's what I'll ask this list to hold me to: within 24 hours, I will
>  holler out the URL to the strawman on this list so people can play
>  around and decide whether to tweak/keep/toss, or what might work better.
>  If the general consensus is that this isn't useful but we have a good
>  discussion on why it isn't and what might be, I'll be ecstatic, because
>  we'll be moving forward and getting more concreteness into the mix.
>
>  If you want to help/keep-company, I'll be on #sugar late tonight
>  (probably starting ~9ish, EST) chugging away. Help is always welcome;
>  I'm concerned about the job getting done, I don't care who does it - if
>  someone else wants to do 100% of it, yay! But even if not, I'll be here.
>  Thoughts and comments, feedback, etc. super-welcome.
>
>  Off to put my money where my mouth is,

Go, Mel.

>  --Mel (who's been lurking for a while; I'm usually shy to speak up on
>  lists, but Bernie's been trying to convince me to get over that. ;-)
>
>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay