Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Announcing the Development Team Lead election
On 05/15/2010 06:48 PM, Chris Ball wrote: Hi everyone, Tomeu's stepping down as the Development Team Lead¹, and we'd like to elect a replacement. This is an important position -- the team lead is responsible for setting clear goals for the team, being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community, appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release and helping to define its scope, and holding regular Development Team meetings on IRC, including coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features. There are more details on the role and the team here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team Hi Chris, the position as you describe it, seems quite complex. I would make a difference between a coordinator and a leader. The coordinator will make sure there are regular meetings to be held and to give a structure for those and is in contact with the release manager about the schedule. A team can have several leaders, this role is not appointed but comes naturally with the work one has been doing, in my opinion. I don't think the development team lead has to appoint the release manager. From my experience I can say, that I did one release with Marco together and then kept on doing it. Ideally a model where the current release manager is shadowed and then keeps on that task. If we have more candidates that want to fulfill that role, even better, they can share this task. Coordination with the design team is a good point, and the design team coordinator is another critical open vacancy. Last release I did manage that since I was interested in the outcome for the release, though this was not a long term solution ;) And for the general strategy, we have the Feature process [1]. This helps all the deployments and contributors to raise their voice. And if there is consensus in the community the Features will make their way forward into releases. So, we have the processes to move forward, we just have to use them and keep on doing. In general, I think we should wide spread more the load. There is an issue of resources. And we have to describe the positions and fill them. Make the roles small and clear, define them well and communicate well between the teams are the keys here. Most of the tasks are not that time consuming at all, but if people does fill out several roles it quickly gets too much for the individual. From my experience from last releases I would definitely add to the list: the deployment team position (which has been done already), the design team one and the testing one. Those were always the week points in previous releases. Thanks for helping to enhance in this area, Simon [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Policy ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] community team
Hi, following the recent interest in discussing resourcing and the teams structure, I would like to mention again the need for a community team that takes ownership of this area. Right now this work is unowned and is carried in an uncoordinated manner by several members of our community, which is rather unfortunate because they have several other responsibilities to take care of and because a coordinated effort could be much more effective in making sure that SLs is a good environment for people to work together on furthering Sugar. Community management is a young discipline that is blooming strong these days and though still a bit wild, there's even literature on it and could be a very interesting career path. If you know someone looking for such a challenge, please refer them here. Having a team that focuses on resourcing issues could be the base for more stable growth in SLs. Thanks, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] New chapters of Reading And Leading With Sugar could use a review
I've begun writing chapters on making your own e-books and I'd like some feedback. I don't consider these chapters to be finished. I've made a decent attempt at creating a first e-book (from scanning page images from The Big Aviation Book For Boys) and I'm working on a second book (an lavishly illustrated adaption of The Arabian Nights for young readers) where I hope to avoid the mistakes I made on the first one. I'm in the position of writing a manual on a subject I'm still learning, which is kind of like how the last book I did ended up. The URL is: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/Introduction When I have these chapters finished I'll start work on publishing and distributing ebooks, which will cover such things as making contributions to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive as well as Sayamindu's Book Server project, plus other alternatives as I think of them. Thanks, James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Announcing the Development Team Lead election
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:40 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@tomeuvizoso.net wrote: Hi, sorry for getting late to this discussion, have been traveling this weekend. It is unfortunate that you were unable to join us. Obviously, given your experience, your input is critical to getting this position properly defined and filled. (I mistakenly assumed that you would have had an opportunity to respond to Chris's initial drafts. We should have held off sending the note until we had a chance to integrate your feedback.) Just wanted to make some clarifications and to explain my position on this. On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 18:48, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi everyone, Tomeu's stepping down as the Development Team Lead¹, I actually stepped down as development team coordinator which is/was an administrative role, I wasn't the development team leader because that position has never existed before in our community. I tried to make it very clear on the email you cite. and we'd like to elect a replacement. This is an important position -- the team lead is responsible for setting clear goals for the team, being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community, appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release and helping to define its scope, and holding regular Development Team meetings on IRC, including coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features. Has there been any discussion on the creation of this role? Are there plans to create such strong positions for other teams? Please don't read so much into the word leader, which I think can mean either or both an administrative (coordinator) and someone who establishes clear goals (and processes). The way in which SL has established its team structure, we give great autonomy to teams to run in whatever way they need to to accomplish their goals. We maintain a liaison to the oversight board, but otherwise, they free to organize themselves, as long as they are aligned with the overall SL goals. There are more details on the role and the team here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team But the wiki still refers to a chairman-like team coordinator, not to the leader position with heavy responsibilities that you describe in this email. My concerns about the position you are describing on this email: - responsible for setting clear goals for the team: May not be what you meant to say, but I think a single individual cannot be setting goals for a team when most people are volunteers or employed by several organizations. Maybe you meant making sure that the team has clear goals and is kept focused which is what is in the wiki? - being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community: this sounds like a rather big responsibility to me. For example, what will happen with modules that are unmaintained such as hulahop and browse? If nobody has stepped up to maintain those since they were orphaned, are we going to consider the team lead a failure if nobody steps up in the future? If we put such a pressure on a single individual, maybe that person will feel compelled to take decisions that affect negatively other aspects such as QA or deployment participation? - appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release: if you mean just formally appointing whoever the team members choose, then I'm fine with it, but it's not obvious for me as it's expressed. What about the other positions related to development, the team lead also need to appoint those? Until now we have never seen two people competing for a role, nor disagreement on a candidacy. - coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features: do we really need that the team leads takes this responsibility as well? Or is assumed that the team lead will delegate it on others? There seems to be a miscommunication. My presumption is that this scope of work applies to the Development Team and that the role of the leader/coordinator is to ensure that there is a structure in place to accomplish these tasks. Delegation is one way to do this. Others include setting a example (being a role model) that others can follow. Personally, I think we need a combination of approaches. But I don't think anyone expects that the leader will do everything his/herself. Regarding the important role of Release Manager, I don't think there is any argument that we need to fill that position and Simon has graciously offered to help bring the new person up to speed. (We'd been unsuccessful in finding someone to shadow Simon during the 0.86 and 0.88 releases, which is unfortunate.) At issue is how do we find/appoint the new release manager. I think the intention of the oversight board is to delegate that responsibility to the Development Team, where presumably there is the knowledge and experience to make such an important decision. How they reach that decision is a local decision, presumably in keeping with all the of the
Re: [IAEP] Announcing the Development Team Lead election
Hi Tomeu, I actually stepped down as development team coordinator which is/was an administrative role, I wasn't the development team leader because that position has never existed before in our community. I tried to make it very clear on the email you cite. Sorry about that. I wasn't thinking of a strong distinction between the two; we started talking about electing a new lead in the SLOBS meeting, and the title stuck in my writing. - being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community: this sounds like a rather big responsibility to me. For example, what will happen with modules that are unmaintained such as hulahop and browse? For this point, we were thinking about someone who makes sure that patches sent in for review are replied to and applied quickly (perhaps via delegation), rather than someone who will single-handedly maintain all the code we've received in the past. In short, we want to make sure that there's no bottleneck on community contributions of patches at the SL end. - appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release: if you mean just formally appointing whoever the team members choose, then I'm fine with it, but it's not obvious for me as it's expressed. What about the other positions related to development, the team lead also need to appoint those? Until now we have never seen two people competing for a role, nor disagreement on a candidacy. We talked in the SLOBS meeting on Friday about our urgent need to start planning 0.90, and decided that finding a release manager would be a good first task for the new development team lead/coordinator. If the development team is already able to appoint a new release manager, you should certainly go ahead and do that -- we were operating under the assumption that no-one had been found yet. (I think part of the reason I had that assumption is that the wiki page for the development team only lists you and Simon as members.) http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Contacts - coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features: do we really need that the team leads takes this responsibility as well? Or is assumed that the team lead will delegate it on others? I think that team leads should take responsibility for this, but that the responsibility can be satisfied by delegating it to others. May I suggest that both candidates and voters are restricted to development team members? This would encourage interested people to join the team, strengthening it. I think that by giving some autonomy to teams we'll be encouraging them to take ownership of their areas. That sounds fine, if you're saying that standing/voting is still open to anyone, but that they should first sign up to join the team before doing either. I agree is very important to find people interested on leading efforts and taking responsibilities, but I think is equally important to have a team structure that encourage division of work, diversity of opinions and pooling of resources. Makes sense. Sounds like we should defer to the Development Team in defining the role. I'm also not sure we need a full-blown election with selectricity. I'm thinking that open voting on the mailing list may be enough, unless we are expecting that people won't vote freely without anonymity. Okay. Let's continue gathering candidates as we were, and then the team can decide what to do with the result; whether to have an internal election, full election or something else. Thanks to you for taking this important task, I'm very happy to see we are making progresses on this area. Hope the concerns I have raised above aren't seen as push back but as sincere opinions. No problem. - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Announcing the Development Team Lead election
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 15:51, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:40 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@tomeuvizoso.net wrote: Hi, sorry for getting late to this discussion, have been traveling this weekend. It is unfortunate that you were unable to join us. Obviously, given your experience, your input is critical to getting this position properly defined and filled. (I mistakenly assumed that you would have had an opportunity to respond to Chris's initial drafts. We should have held off sending the note until we had a chance to integrate your feedback.) Just wanted to make some clarifications and to explain my position on this. On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 18:48, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi everyone, Tomeu's stepping down as the Development Team Lead¹, I actually stepped down as development team coordinator which is/was an administrative role, I wasn't the development team leader because that position has never existed before in our community. I tried to make it very clear on the email you cite. and we'd like to elect a replacement. This is an important position -- the team lead is responsible for setting clear goals for the team, being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community, appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release and helping to define its scope, and holding regular Development Team meetings on IRC, including coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features. Has there been any discussion on the creation of this role? Are there plans to create such strong positions for other teams? Please don't read so much into the word leader, which I think can mean either or both an administrative (coordinator) and someone who establishes clear goals (and processes). The way in which SL has established its team structure, we give great autonomy to teams to run in whatever way they need to to accomplish their goals. We maintain a liaison to the oversight board, but otherwise, they free to organize themselves, as long as they are aligned with the overall SL goals. There are more details on the role and the team here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team But the wiki still refers to a chairman-like team coordinator, not to the leader position with heavy responsibilities that you describe in this email. My concerns about the position you are describing on this email: - responsible for setting clear goals for the team: May not be what you meant to say, but I think a single individual cannot be setting goals for a team when most people are volunteers or employed by several organizations. Maybe you meant making sure that the team has clear goals and is kept focused which is what is in the wiki? - being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community: this sounds like a rather big responsibility to me. For example, what will happen with modules that are unmaintained such as hulahop and browse? If nobody has stepped up to maintain those since they were orphaned, are we going to consider the team lead a failure if nobody steps up in the future? If we put such a pressure on a single individual, maybe that person will feel compelled to take decisions that affect negatively other aspects such as QA or deployment participation? - appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release: if you mean just formally appointing whoever the team members choose, then I'm fine with it, but it's not obvious for me as it's expressed. What about the other positions related to development, the team lead also need to appoint those? Until now we have never seen two people competing for a role, nor disagreement on a candidacy. - coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features: do we really need that the team leads takes this responsibility as well? Or is assumed that the team lead will delegate it on others? There seems to be a miscommunication. My presumption is that this scope of work applies to the Development Team and that the role of the leader/coordinator is to ensure that there is a structure in place to accomplish these tasks. If those responsibilities belong to the team and the lead/coordinator is responsible only for making sure that the team is well setup to tackle them, then it looks fine to me. Given that we haven't had much success in past calls for team coordinators, I think we should be reducing this role to its minimum and let people surpass expectations as they see fit. Delegation is one way to do this. Others include setting a example (being a role model) that others can follow. Personally, I think we need a combination of approaches. But I don't think anyone expects that the leader will do everything his/herself. Regarding the important role of Release Manager, I don't think there is any argument that we need to fill that position and Simon has graciously offered to help bring the new person up to speed.
Re: [IAEP] Announcing the Development Team Lead election
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 16:45, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi Tomeu, I actually stepped down as development team coordinator which is/was an administrative role, I wasn't the development team leader because that position has never existed before in our community. I tried to make it very clear on the email you cite. Sorry about that. I wasn't thinking of a strong distinction between the two; we started talking about electing a new lead in the SLOBS meeting, and the title stuck in my writing. - being a responsive upstream for work we receive from the community: this sounds like a rather big responsibility to me. For example, what will happen with modules that are unmaintained such as hulahop and browse? For this point, we were thinking about someone who makes sure that patches sent in for review are replied to and applied quickly (perhaps via delegation), rather than someone who will single-handedly maintain all the code we've received in the past. In short, we want to make sure that there's no bottleneck on community contributions of patches at the SL end. It's good to have someone caring about this and busy maintainers use to appreciate when they are pinged when some patch needs attention. Something I think that could be a tremendous improvement is moving the review report from dev.laptop.org to bugs.sugarlabs.org. By having an automated report that tells what is in the queue and for how long, maintainers have a very direct feedback without nobody having to do extra effort past the initial installation. - appointing a release manager for the next (0.90) release: if you mean just formally appointing whoever the team members choose, then I'm fine with it, but it's not obvious for me as it's expressed. What about the other positions related to development, the team lead also need to appoint those? Until now we have never seen two people competing for a role, nor disagreement on a candidacy. We talked in the SLOBS meeting on Friday about our urgent need to start planning 0.90, and decided that finding a release manager would be a good first task for the new development team lead/coordinator. If the development team is already able to appoint a new release manager, you should certainly go ahead and do that -- we were operating under the assumption that no-one had been found yet. But if the dev team cannot find a release manager, how could the dev team leader? Maybe I have been reading too much in the particular chose of words, as Walter said, and by appointing you meant just to keep the issue of the release manager in the TODO list and agenda until one is found. (I think part of the reason I had that assumption is that the wiki page for the development team only lists you and Simon as members.) http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Contacts That's really unfortunate, hopefully this will get fixed soon. - coordination with the Design and Deployment Teams on new features: do we really need that the team leads takes this responsibility as well? Or is assumed that the team lead will delegate it on others? I think that team leads should take responsibility for this, but that the responsibility can be satisfied by delegating it to others. May I suggest that both candidates and voters are restricted to development team members? This would encourage interested people to join the team, strengthening it. I think that by giving some autonomy to teams we'll be encouraging them to take ownership of their areas. That sounds fine, if you're saying that standing/voting is still open to anyone, but that they should first sign up to join the team before doing either. Well, each team could put conditions on who can become a member, but I don't have a strong opinion on this. I agree is very important to find people interested on leading efforts and taking responsibilities, but I think is equally important to have a team structure that encourage division of work, diversity of opinions and pooling of resources. Makes sense. Sounds like we should defer to the Development Team in defining the role. I'm also not sure we need a full-blown election with selectricity. I'm thinking that open voting on the mailing list may be enough, unless we are expecting that people won't vote freely without anonymity. Okay. Let's continue gathering candidates as we were, and then the team can decide what to do with the result; whether to have an internal election, full election or something else. Sounds great, thanks again for stepping up with this. Regards, Tomeu Thanks to you for taking this important task, I'm very happy to see we are making progresses on this area. Hope the concerns I have raised above aren't seen as push back but as sincere opinions. No problem. - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child
Re: [IAEP] New chapters of Reading And Leading With Sugar could use a review
Rebecca, One thing that FLOSS Manuals does is allow you to submit a cover image so hardbound copies can be printed on demand using Lulu.com or Amazon's service. I wasn't planning on submitting a cover image for this book, but I could. I did submit one for Make Your Own Sugar Activities! but it's been months now and nobody from FLOSS Manuals has made the cover yet. I'll bug them about it again in a couple of weeks. If you DO bind and print copies of this be aware that there are TWO methods of creating PDFs of FLOSS Manuals. The one built into the site is not the best way. The one you want to use is at http://objavi.flossmanuals.net. That creates a really beautiful PDF that you can submit to Lulu.com. FLOSS Manuals has some new software called Booki that they may use to create a FLOSS Manuals-style site for books in general. If they do it could be a fantastic resource for educators wanting to create free textbooks. I also read on the Project Gutenberg website that while currently only books 1923 and before are in the public domain in 2019 pretty much everything between 1923 and the 1970's goes into the public domain, all at once. I'm finding the subject of e-books a lot more interesting than I thought it would be when I began this book. In the next few years our ideas about publishing could change drastically, and I think for the better. James Simmons On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud webch...@invisible.net wrote: Hi, James - I will give this a close read today - it looks like a great start. I know it will be really fun structuring a summer program around this ... I plan to have the RDC mentees create their own books - but it might be interesting to create some physical books of the manual itself during the program using our facilities and bookbinding equipment. I often use the physical manifestations of books to raise awareness for my program (I generally ask for a donation at cost - it is more a publicity vehicle than anything else). I do know we are missing some relevant PDF applications. We should definitely add Scribus here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/MakingPDFs (I can add it after I give the whole manual a read) Rebecca Malamud -- http://ruraldesigncollective.org James Simmons wrote: I've begun writing chapters on making your own e-books and I'd like some feedback. I don't consider these chapters to be finished. I've made a decent attempt at creating a first e-book (from scanning page images from The Big Aviation Book For Boys) and I'm working on a second book (an lavishly illustrated adaption of The Arabian Nights for young readers) where I hope to avoid the mistakes I made on the first one. I'm in the position of writing a manual on a subject I'm still learning, which is kind of like how the last book I did ended up. The URL is: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/Introduction When I have these chapters finished I'll start work on publishing and distributing ebooks, which will cover such things as making contributions to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive as well as Sayamindu's Book Server project, plus other alternatives as I think of them. Thanks, James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
There has been discussion on development processes and a development team lead over the past couple of days. As this discussion moves forward, I would like the community to consider the effects of working with commercial entity. Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar. One of these opportunities is a service and support business for deployments. As such, we are building network of developers to work on deployment specific issues. One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
Am 17.05.2010 19:43, schrieb David Farning: There has been discussion on development processes and a development team lead over the past couple of days. As this discussion moves forward, I would like the community to consider the effects of working with commercial entity. Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar. One of these opportunities is a service and support business for deployments. As such, we are building network of developers to work on deployment specific issues. One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment Looking back at the many discussions (both in-person and on-list) we had on this topic over the past 24 months it's probably not gonna come as a surprise that I think that this is a good step into the right direction. David, thanks for all your efforts in this area, they're much appreciated! Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 1:43 PM, David Farning dfarn...@gmail.com wrote: Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar. One of these opportunities is a service and support business for deployments. As such, we are building network of developers to work on deployment specific issues. Excellent news. All successful software -- regardless of license, platform and other factors -- thrives on a network of highly skilled professionals around it. IME, an important challenge going forward for all involved is to maintain a high level of professionalism in the good and in the bad times. There are lots of little things -- for example managing expectations and knowing when you are speaking for yourself / your company, when for SL, when for OLPC. Some people have @laptop and @sugarlabs addresses -- making sure that it is clear who you are, and what hat are you wearing at a particular time is not trivial. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- 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!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New chapters of Reading And Leading With Sugar could use a review
Rebecca, It would not so much be a cover for the book as an image for the front cover. The Sugar books all have consistent cover designs. The only differences are the words in the title and the cover image. I'd like to make my cover the same as the others. I did come up with my own image for Make Your Own Sugar Activities! and I would have done something similar for this book if I did it myself, but I'd be happy to have an artistic person have a crack at either one or both. Just make she understands that she only gets to do a cover image, not a whole cover. Now it is quite possible that this book could be remixed to be two books: one for Sugaristas and another for e-book enthusiasts in general. It is important to me that Sugar users have a book specifically for them. However, the subject is bigger than just Sugar users. If we did this second book (proposed title Everything You Always Wanted To Know About E-Books (But Were Afraid To Ask) then your candidate maybe could do a whole cover. As for Lulu and Amazon, what they offer is print on demand books. You order a book, they print it and bind it and send it to you. If you go through Amazon you get an ISBN number and the book is in the Amazon catalog. The customer gets a bound book for cheap and FLOSS Manuals gets the profit. Now there is nothing at all to prevent you from using OBJAVI to create a nice PDF of either book, design your own cover, and print and sell that and keep whatever profit there is yourself. The book licensing allows that. The idea for me with Lulu is to have bound and printed books available on an ongoing basis for Sugar users to buy, and for FLOSS Manuals to profit. I think there are many ways your candidates could get involved with this book (or the remixed version) as contributors. They could write up their projects as case studies, for one thing. I'm trying to get teachers interested in the potential of free e-books and case studies of actual students working in that area would be a terrific addition to either book. James Simmons On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud webch...@invisible.net wrote: Wonderful! Could the Rural Design Collective design your cover for the book? We are interviewing a candidate this week who would be PERFECT for this project. This would be solid professional experience for her. The books that we print will be offered by my studio to raise local awareness for our program (and your book, of course!). The online manifestations should indeed go through Lulu or Amazon (or whatever channels established by FLOSS Manuals). Yes, I am aware of Booki - wonderful project! Rebecca Malamud --- http://ruraldesigncollective.org James Simmons wrote: Rebecca, One thing that FLOSS Manuals does is allow you to submit a cover image so hardbound copies can be printed on demand using Lulu.com or Amazon's service. I wasn't planning on submitting a cover image for this book, but I could. I did submit one for Make Your Own Sugar Activities! but it's been months now and nobody from FLOSS Manuals has made the cover yet. I'll bug them about it again in a couple of weeks. If you DO bind and print copies of this be aware that there are TWO methods of creating PDFs of FLOSS Manuals. The one built into the site is not the best way. The one you want to use is at http://objavi.flossmanuals.net. That creates a really beautiful PDF that you can submit to Lulu.com. FLOSS Manuals has some new software called Booki that they may use to create a FLOSS Manuals-style site for books in general. If they do it could be a fantastic resource for educators wanting to create free textbooks. I also read on the Project Gutenberg website that while currently only books 1923 and before are in the public domain in 2019 pretty much everything between 1923 and the 1970's goes into the public domain, all at once. I'm finding the subject of e-books a lot more interesting than I thought it would be when I began this book. In the next few years our ideas about publishing could change drastically, and I think for the better. James Simmons On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud webch...@invisible.net wrote: Hi, James - I will give this a close read today - it looks like a great start. I know it will be really fun structuring a summer program around this ... I plan to have the RDC mentees create their own books - but it might be interesting to create some physical books of the manual itself during the program using our facilities and bookbinding equipment. I often use the physical manifestations of books to raise awareness for my program (I generally ask for a donation at cost - it is more a publicity vehicle than anything else). I do know we are missing some relevant PDF applications. We should definitely add Scribus here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/MakingPDFs (I can add
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:43:19PM -0500, David Farning wrote: One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment Another (quite related) consideration is the risk of discouraging similar volunteer efforts. This brings (at least) two disadvantages: 1. Increasing the gap between developers and users. 2. Encumbering the project with (more) discrete communiction. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
Am 17.05.2010 23:50, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard: On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:43:19PM -0500, David Farning wrote: One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment Another (quite related) consideration is the risk of discouraging similar volunteer efforts. This brings (at least) two disadvantages: 1. Increasing the gap between developers and users. 2. Encumbering the project with (more) discrete communiction. Luke raised similar concerns during the Sugar Labs Budget discussion last April and I still stick to my reply from back then (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005028.html): Quote from http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html: Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects can use money and paid labor to a tremendous benefit that only magnifies their accomplishments. I personally think this is something that Sugar Labs should be aiming for. Also I think it's important to realize there's a difference between paying development and paying developers. As a Sugar user I don't particularly care about who commits the code or writes the documentation as long as the job of fixing bugs and improving and advancing the platform gets done. Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Christoph Derndorfer e0425...@student.tuwien.ac.at wrote: Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects There is a bit of misdirection in there. Projects are rarely defined as a voluntary free software project. IMHE successful long term projects have diverse group of developers with diverse driving forces. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- 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!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
Hi Cristoph and others, On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 12:04:08AM +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: Am 17.05.2010 23:50, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard: On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:43:19PM -0500, David Farning wrote: One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often boring -- stuff like bug fixes. As such we are paying the developers the going rate rate for developers in their country or region. This brings three advantages: 1. The deployment issues are fixed. 2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar. 3. There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment Another (quite related) consideration is the risk of discouraging similar volunteer efforts. This brings (at least) two disadvantages: 1. Increasing the gap between developers and users. 2. Encumbering the project with (more) discrete communiction. Luke raised similar concerns during the Sugar Labs Budget discussion last April and I still stick to my reply from back then (http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005028.html): Quote from http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html: Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects can use money and paid labor to a tremendous benefit that only magnifies their accomplishments. I personally think this is something that Sugar Labs should be aiming for. Also I think it's important to realize there's a difference between paying development and paying developers. As a Sugar user I don't particularly care about who commits the code or writes the documentation as long as the job of fixing bugs and improving and advancing the platform gets done. I am not Sugar developer, nor am I a user. Just a volunteer distributor. I fully agree with Mako's statement quoted above. A key part as I see it is that of transparency. Making deals with commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches). - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: Making deals with commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches). Actually, most of the kernel development these days is funded. The planning, design, development, review and rework are done openly. All teh technical work is open and transparent, that's all. Android, of a thousand of funded projects, has been mismanaged from the PoV of the kernel upstream. Sure. But the correlation you are trying to make is not there. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- 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!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] community team
This is definitely a great idea and will facilitate involvement in Sugar Labs for new members/volunteers - ultimately allowing for further growth of the organization as a whole. Let me know how I can help out with this. Thanks, Anurag On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@tomeuvizoso.net wrote: Hi, following the recent interest in discussing resourcing and the teams structure, I would like to mention again the need for a community team that takes ownership of this area. Right now this work is unowned and is carried in an uncoordinated manner by several members of our community, which is rather unfortunate because they have several other responsibilities to take care of and because a coordinated effort could be much more effective in making sure that SLs is a good environment for people to work together on furthering Sugar. Community management is a young discipline that is blooming strong these days and though still a bit wild, there's even literature on it and could be a very interesting career path. If you know someone looking for such a challenge, please refer them here. Having a team that focuses on resourcing issues could be the base for more stable growth in SLs. Thanks, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Anurag Goel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: Making deals with commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches). Actually, most of the kernel development these days is funded. The planning, design, development, review and rework are done openly. All teh technical work is open and transparent, that's all. Android, of a thousand of funded projects, has been mismanaged from the PoV of the kernel upstream. Sure. But the correlation you are trying to make is not there. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. cheers, All of the participants on this thread have identified potential strengths and potential weakness of commercial projects working together with community projects. I expect that transparency will be my biggest problem. Not because I am doing anything super secret, but because I am reaching outside of the open source community and working mostly with educators and deployers. Many of them have little of no experience working with open source development methodologies. Thus it will take ramp up time to acclimate new developers to the community. WRT to crowding out. This tends to happen when 'paid developers' operate as a block and give each other more authority then developers outside the block. As such _all_ of the Sugar developers_ I am working with are doing bug fixes -- which must be pushed upstream. It is pretty hard to argue that fixing bugs, many of which have been open for years, is crowding out others. This issue may come up again as the particular group of developers I am working with become more experience and earn commit and maintainer authority. The bottom line is that some communities and companies find ways to work effectively together and others don't. david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] ANNOUNCE: F11 for XO-1 build 180py released
This is a late announcement of the final release of the XO-1 images based on Fedora 11 and Sugar 0.84: http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.img http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.crc http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os180py.img.fs.zip This build is being deployed to 10 schools in Caacupé [1]. Feedback from teachers and teacher trainers has been very positive so far. == Changes relative to the previous release (os140py) == * GSM broadband support: add usb_modeswitch and usb_modeswitch-data, enabling more modem models to work with Fedora 11. (me) * Credit Sugar Labs in boot animation (me) * Add custom Browse home page with links to Paraguay Educa resources (rgs) * Update Turtle Art to pick Spanish translation (walter) * Re-enable olpc-update and the versioned fs (me) * Point software update control panel at http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org * Pull latest OS updates from upstream (fedora) == Bugs fixed == * Race condition with name widget in the activity toolbar http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1948 * Some activities crashing when resuming from the Journal http://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/15/ == Known bugs == * Unable to read FAT filesystems containing invalid file dates http://patchwork.sugarlabs.org/patch/43/ == How to help testing == Feedback from the entire community is very appreciated, although we're not planning any further releases of the Sugar 0.84 series. Bugs affecting upstream components are better filed in their respective trackers: * Sugar and activities: http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ * Fedora 11: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ * Drivers and OLPC customizations: http://dev.laptop.org/ * Paraguay-specific bugs: http://trac.paraguayeduca.org/ If you're unsure where a bug belongs to, use the Paragauy Educa tracker. Please, always assign these bugs to Carlos, who will keep our status summary updated. == Using this build outside Paraguay == A few customizations make this image somewhat Paraguay-specific: * Limited language support: to save space, we've included only English and Spanish translations. * Image signed with the Paraguay deployment keys. Laptops from other regions need to be be unlocked in order to accept this image. * The software update control panel icon checks for new activities on our wiki rather than on laptop.org. * The Browse home page contains the Paraguay Educa logo and a few links to our website. We may find the time to release slightly modified images to meet the needs of other OLPC deployments interested in upgrading to Sugar 0.84. More importantly, we're happy to help other deployments produce their own OS images independently of us, thus exploiting Free Software's most important advantage [2]. == How to join development == This development cycle is closed as a new development cycle based on Sugar 0.88 has started already. Public builds will be available soon. Build system source: http://git.paraguayeduca.org/gitweb/users/bernie/olpc-os-builder.git Yum Repository containing our custom RPMs (along with sources): http://repo.paraguayeduca.org/f11-xo1-py/i386/os/ http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/pyeduca-repo/f11-xo1-py/ IRC: #olpc-paraguay irc.feenode.net (English spoken) [1] The actual production build is os179py. The only difference between os179py and os180py is improved compatibility with GSM modems. [2] Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
