[IAEP] Communicating project goals and Roadmap

[Simon Schampijer]

On 07/02/2009 12:27 PM, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 18:18, David Farning<dfarning at sugarlabs.org>  wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 7:14 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org>  wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 00:40, David Farning<dfarning at sugarlabs.org>  wrote:
>>>> This thread is an attempt to help clean up a couple of issues that
>>>> have been cropping up over the past couple of months.
>>>>
>>>> There have been a couple of instances of suboptimal communication
>>>> between different parts of the project.
>>>>
>>>> Several times recently, external organizations have been looking for a
>>>> big picture view of what is happening at Sugar Labs.
>>>>
>>>> The .84 release was pretty easy to coordinate.  The development team
>>>> picked a release date about six months after .82.  The developers
>>>> followed the time line pretty well.  Simon did a fantastic just with
>>>> just a stick and a handful of carrots as release manager getting
>>>> getting the release shipped on time.  The only two external
>>>> organizations we worked with closely were Fedora and OLPC.
>>>>
>>>> With the midterm release of Strawberry, we have seen the importance of
>>>> improving communication with more internal groups and external
>>>> organizations.
>>>>
>>>> Internally, we have seen the importance of synchronizing development,
>>>> marketing, and the project as a whole's time lines and goals.
>>>>
>>>> Externally, we have seen a significant increase in external
>>>> organization participation.  Several university have express
>>>> interested in working with SL.  Several distributions are becoming
>>>> more involved. Several new pilots and deployments are participating in
>>>> Sugar development rather than just consuming Sugar.
>>>>
>>>> A first step will be to start working on project and team level road
>>>> maps which assign dates and champions to significant events.
>>>>
>>>> Sugar Labs and each team already have  roadmap pages listed.  Over the
>>>> next couple of weeks, I would like to work with the development, SoaS,
>>>> marketing, infrastructure teams to create roadmaps and goals.  (This
>>>> is not to exclude any other teams participation.)
>>>>
>>>> Then using iteration and project level goals we can start linking the
>>>> roadmaps together.
>>> Sounds great!
>>>
>>> Tomeu
>>>
>> There is now a very rough draft/outline at
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Roadmap .
>
> First of all, you mention several times a "release" but don't specify
> what gets released. Also, is the Sugar Learning Platform the upstream
> project? What about SoaS? Also, what is "Unified SoaS"?
>
> "Release dates up to and including .86 have been determined by the
> development team. Starting with .88, the release schedule will be
> determined by the Sugar Labs oversight board."

Is this picking a date for the release or deciding what goes into a 
release?

For the date - we have picked it to align to our downstream projects - 
the linux distributions. So far this worked quite well. So the current 
dates are not picked arbitrary.

Features: Depending on the Fedora policy I hacked up this one for 
features: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Policy

To reduce overhead, like an engineering steering commitee I took out the 
Fesco part. I think for the near future we are fine with such a 'simple' 
policy.

> I didn't knew that the oversight board was supposed to take such
> day-to-day decisions. In any case, I hope that the date that the SLOBs
> decide for the Sugar Learning Platform is the same as the development
> team decides, because otherwise we are going to have a big conflict
> here.

+1

Regards,
    Simon