On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Bernie Innocenti<[email protected]> wrote: > My initial reaction was that community projects work by employing > maintainers rather than project managers.
Exactly. A PM can only fire you. A maintainer/leader can show his/her priorities in showing areas of focus, encouraging some changes, discouraging others, and implementing strategies like "newcomers have to maintain an unloved chunk of code for a while (and show maturity realising that a refactor may not be accepted)" or "before I take your feature patch, let's see that cleanup & bugfix series finished first". > There was an hidden assumption in my thinking > that a maintainer /could not/ tell people what to do based on the fact > that his workers are unpaid volunteers. Good leaders guide the project, sometimes softly and subtly, sometimes more... openly :-D At a very basic level, it's a carrot and stick thing. > The job > of any half-skilled project manager would be detecting these stalls and > mitigate them whenever possible. With _what_ tools? A PM hasn't got the carrot (which is usually the recognition of the leader: "Torvalds accepted my patch!"). A PM is a manager. A manager is usually someone who can fire you if you don't do your job. > A meta-comment on your post: you don't need to apologize and be shy for Um, I do. You guys are doing the work, so you know a lot more than me about how SL works, or doesn't. I've penned this reply because the SL crowd showed some agreement. If you guys tell me I am off the mark, well, I am outside and bound to misunderstand the org from here. It might tell you about external perceptions, but it would still mean that I am wrong. (And I think this kind of respect is important. All organisations are misunderstood. One only need to read olpcnews to see.) > I recently got useful criticism from Bemasc, Christoph and Daniel on > #sugar regarding our relationship with Deployments. Their feeling is That is interesting. I am starting to work more with deployments in LatAm, perhaps the deployments that are easier to help and easier to get help back from. Still, in general terms it might be years before deployments are in a position to repay your help. For SL sustainability in terms of effort, I'd cast a wider look. cheers, m -- [email protected] [email protected] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
