On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 6:00 PM, David Farning <[email protected]> wrote: > I have gotten confused by all of the threads going on about Local > Labs:( So, as far as I am concerned, if the conversation doesn't > happen on IAEP or a scheduled meeting, it didn't happen. Yes, I meant > to un-subscribe from slobs. Yes, I am aware that if notion that > knowledge is power holds true, I have given up all of my power.
Hey, just a quick follow up. I received about a dozen emails about this paragraph:( Yes, I think that private mailing lists in community based projects are evil. But, as with many things, they are a necessary evil. They are useful in three specific cases: 1. Personal matters. Unfortunately, some people act in ways that are counter productive to the community. Private lists can provide a means to plan for and handle 'poisonous people.' 2. Legal issues. Is company x is abusing our trademark? A community, or its members speaking on behalf of the community, needs to think long and hard before using the community as a launch point for publicly speaking out against another organization. That thinking should happen in private. 3. Confidential negotiations. Occasionally, communities must enter confidential negations with third parties. Perhaps, a government or company is exploring how to work with the community. To avoid premature speculation, the community needs to be able to hold those conversations in a semi private manner. With that being said, I do not believe that Sugar Labs is using the slobs mailing list outside of the scope of the above three points. _I_ am the one getting confused! I currently have dozens of different conversations going on about Local Labs. I am forgetting who said what. I am going to try to consolidate them on IAEP. <Community Theory> #Feel free to skip The question that I am looking at is how to divide the community on trust rather than mistrust. Examples of trust based divisions are our relationship with; The Ubuntu SugarTeam, how many people know anything about what they do and how they do it besides that fact the Sugar packages now ship in Ubuntu:) DebianOLPC, same as above. But, if you read their mailing list you will find a steady stream of posts between Jonas, Holger, the Debian bug tracker, the Debian Archive administrator, and the rest of the crew. SL InfrastructureTeam. How many of us care that the wiki is running on solarsail, git on OSL, and schools.sl.o on a machine hosted by Solutions Grove? This autonomous team did not spontaneous overnight. There was a lot of hard work on the part of Bernie, Ivan, and Luke. Some leaning on the part of Walter. Equal amounts of begging and bitching on my part. SL DevelopmentTeam. Last week I modified my email filter so threads from sugar-devel are marked read by default. I felt myself struggling with that one. After all, isn't the developmentTeam the heart of the project? No, the DevelopmentTeam is the foundation on which everything else is built. But, it is not the heart. I trust Marco and the rest of the team to make the correct choices. In each of the above groups, there is at least one person with a deep understanding of Sugar Labs mission, vision, and values. In three of the four examples one person helped define the mission, vision, and values! In the fourth case, Debian, Sugar Lab's mission, vision, and values were strongly influenced by the success of their project. On the flight home from SugarCamp, I read 'The starfish and the spider.' To make a long story short. If you chop off a spider's legs, it dies. If you chop off a starfish's legs, each leg can regrow into a new starfish. Quite a compelling argument for leaderless organizations! While pretty close, the analogy does not quite fit for the spread of Sugar Labs. Hopefully, we are not going to chop off a leg (or team in our case) and expect it to regrow somewhere else. Instead, I hope we are going to use the Sugar Labs community to develop leaders who are capable of helping Local Labs flourish. Let's see, Bernie, our infrastructure leader, has a visa which is expiring in a few week. Tomue, a core developer, is looking to move soon. Rafael, the deployment team co-leader setting up a pilot lab. Recently, we have had an influx of new people become active on this list. The open question is how do we engage them to participate and become the future leaders that will be ready and able to foster local labs. </Community Theory> thanks david _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
