Hi all, Background:
Step in issue, sugar is not unique here, thats the problem for other FOSS projects as well. But sugar has it's own specific nature - sugar stimulates(at least should) doing not just using, our audience could have additional layers - teachers for examples. Projects like sugar also unique because it's not only about producing final product but about improving basic things - education here. So, many people could want to participate to projects like sugar even if they are tacking part in other FOSS projects. Thus the critical thing for sugar is supporting casual participating. Participating not only by experienced developers but designers, casual doers etc. Someone could argue that it's about gaining critical mass of contributors and we didn't achieve this point yet. But what about achieving critical mass of targeted audience and even users of sugar(thanks to OLPC). For example what can do teacher somewhere in Uruguay if local needs requires some improvement in sugar, he can post en email to one of sugar related lists, ask someone on IRC but is it so friendly?(it's the same level of answers like "ask google"). What can do individual who needs some activity and going to pay for this activity development(during 0.86 cycle I got such request and had to bounce it since didn't have enough time). So, the question is should we have special place to treat such issues in convenient and casual developer/requester friendly manner. This collab.sugarlabs.org shouldn't be the only place to track all sugar users needs and of course any big deployment could have its own internal/external infrastructure. But having one place where every sugar users can look by default could useful. One of benefits of such site is a chance to coordinate sugar development contributions from outsiders/casual-contributors etc. BTW looks like even for core team we don't have strong coordination, there is no regular meetings etc. With collab.sl.o we at least can see what particular contributor is doing right now. Another benefit is that collab.sl.o could be right place to sustain developers by paying for implementing particular feature or having donation button like AMO does. -- This email was subjected by [POLL] to not loss this thread and since this question could be very arguable in details, lets split it to several stages, one for poll of necessity for this feature at all and next(if first stage will be accepted) for discussing details. Please attach +/- to your reply. -- +1 -- Aleksey _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep