Dear developers, In order for educators and "outside" developers to participate (better) in Schooltool, please help to make your decisions to become even more visible and even more "collaboration-friendly"!
Please let me briefly explain the difficulty with the current process. Documenting Decisions --------------------- Many decisions are taken by the development team on a daily basis in IRC. This means communication is carried out publicly - true to the spirit of open source development. So far so good. However, I have often read through the IRC archives to notice some question from a developer about a certain problem in the school domain. Now, I would be glad to offer my input from the particular perspective of my school, but I find it difficult to participate. I cannot afford to pay attention to IRC all day and I cannot afford to back-track IRC logs every week... Here is my suggestion: Could you mail the list with a *weekly summary* of your current decisions (e.g. after the weekly IRC meeting)? That would help tremendously! More Possibilities for Input in-between Official Releases --------------------------------------------------------- You are working with time-based releases. Naturally, there is a bit of a rush for the dev team just before a release to get some more bugs fixed. This is absolutely fine for small, well defined bugs. But hurried decisions wont help the overal design of Schooltool. I think it would help a lot if educators could join the brainstroming and sketching phase, especially since now that there is a concrete base application that users are starting to relate to. It would be fantastic if you could place idea outlines & design concepts on the website, or better even on a wiki? My argument is that in order to arrive at a user-friendly application overall, you need to enable participation and critique when you are still ordering your thoughts / when you are in early design. If you plough away coding, only to discover - after a full month of hard work - that you missed an important related user requirement for a particular feature, this turns into a disappointment, for both "sides". It might well be that I am stating the obvious and I apologise if that's the case. I had to get this off my chest. :-) I really liked Tom's recent posts about the 'Scope of Schooltool 2006' and the request for 'Test School Sites'! Definitely the right way forward, in my opinion. Keep up the high quality work! My kudos to the whole dev team! Best, Philipp -- :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::. Philipp Schroeder DIN15 / Information Architecture & Interaction Design www.din15.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
