Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Sat, Nov 02, 2013 at 06:46:05PM -0500, David Farning wrote: On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:59 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: p.s. it is good that you are being transparent with your decisions, because that gives you a chance to have them publically reviewed. ;-) On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 12:04:11PM -0500, David Farning wrote: Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. To not participate in the design process is entirely your decision, but, if you'll accept my advice, your reasoning for the decision is flawed! Credibility is not what you think it is. In this context credibility is a combination of trustworthiness and expertise... which is individually earned from one's peers. At this point I don't expect that either I nor any of the developers from Activity have established credibility within Sugar Labs. By what mechanism does this make problematic participation in the design process? The process needs a wide range of input. The process needs people who have low expertise, because expertise can bias the process in other ways; ways that lead to satisfied developers and puzzled users. The process needs people who have low trustworthiness, because they can be brave with their input, despite not being able to follow up. Sugar Labs has had valuable contribution from people with low expertise and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is also pretty straight forward: 1. Does the individual have a track record of, saying what they will do and then doing what they said they would do? 2. Is the individual able to fairly balance their own interests, the interests of the project, and the interests of the ecosystem? 3. Is the individual able to bring out the best in themselves and other around them though effective work and communication? I don't quite meet those definitions of trusthworthiness. Can I go now? ;-) You are undermining your reputation by showing a behaviour pattern characteristic of young boys playing football. The boy who owns the ball has rights. When they are not satisfied, they take their ball and go home. You want a ball to throw into play; your expertise and trusthworthiness; because this gives you better business outcomes. Look around at the players. The boys from the OLPCA family have been called away; trouble back home. The boys from OLPC Australia are busy off to one side finishing their game. There's a new game about to begin (the design process for next release), and the coach (release engineer) is about to blow his whistle. The crowd gathers. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:59 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: p.s. it is good that you are being transparent with your decisions, because that gives you a chance to have them publically reviewed. ;-) On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 12:04:11PM -0500, David Farning wrote: Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. To not participate in the design process is entirely your decision, but, if you'll accept my advice, your reasoning for the decision is flawed! Credibility is not what you think it is. In this context credibility is a combination of trustworthiness and expertise... which is individually earned from one's peers. At this point I don't expect that either I nor any of the developers from Activity have established credibility within Sugar Labs. Expertise is pretty straight forward, does the individual have a history of making good decisions about the subject at hand? Trustworthiness is also pretty straight forward: 1. Does the individual have a track record of, saying what they will do and then doing what they said they would do? 2. Is the individual able to fairly balance their own interests, the interests of the project, and the interests of the ecosystem? 3. Is the individual able to bring out the best in themselves and other around them though effective work and communication? Credibility take time and effort to earn. For technical design and feature specification in the Sugar Labs community, organisational credibility is not required. It is the technical input that is valuable. Sugar Labs has received valuable input from a range of credibilities, including bright young children, teachers of children, and crusty old engineers like me. And if you do think organisational credibility is required, that begs the question of why ... is it that you expect your technical input to be swayed by your credibility? Surely not. Don't hold the community to ransom for your technical input, just give it, give it early, and give it often. Let's give it 2-3 months for AC's RD team learning how to work effectively with the HTML5+JS team at SL. Use this phase of the process as an opportunity for you and your people to practice communicating with other developers in the community; and measure the effort in the design process, not the achievements. In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. I'm worried that it is quite late in the life of the web activities framework for this feedback, but better late than never. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. Let's give it 2-3 months for AC's RD team learning how to work effectively with the HTML5+JS team at SL. In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 20:29, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Hi David, I just started a thread about 0.102 focus and features. If you want to get involved defining the upstream roadmap there is your chance! For 0.100 we kept that very very simple, a short list of new features basically. But if you want to contribute with a product specification I think that would be awesome. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
p.s. it is good that you are being transparent with your decisions, because that gives you a chance to have them publically reviewed. ;-) On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 12:04:11PM -0500, David Farning wrote: Thanks for the update. Currently, AC does not have the credibility to participate in the design process. To not participate in the design process is entirely your decision, but, if you'll accept my advice, your reasoning for the decision is flawed! Credibility is not what you think it is. For technical design and feature specification in the Sugar Labs community, organisational credibility is not required. It is the technical input that is valuable. Sugar Labs has received valuable input from a range of credibilities, including bright young children, teachers of children, and crusty old engineers like me. And if you do think organisational credibility is required, that begs the question of why ... is it that you expect your technical input to be swayed by your credibility? Surely not. Don't hold the community to ransom for your technical input, just give it, give it early, and give it often. Let's give it 2-3 months for AC's RD team learning how to work effectively with the HTML5+JS team at SL. Use this phase of the process as an opportunity for you and your people to practice communicating with other developers in the community; and measure the effort in the design process, not the achievements. In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. I'm worried that it is quite late in the life of the web activities framework for this feedback, but better late than never. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 1 November 2013 21:59, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: Use this phase of the process as an opportunity for you and your people to practice communicating with other developers in the community; and measure the effort in the design process, not the achievements. +1 In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. I'm worried that it is quite late in the life of the web activities framework for this feedback, but better late than never. I think we are still veary ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 1 November 2013 22:09, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 1 November 2013 21:59, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: Use this phase of the process as an opportunity for you and your people to practice communicating with other developers in the community; and measure the effort in the design process, not the achievements. +1 In the first couple of weeks, I expect that this will mostly involve creating web activities to build familiarity the the technologies and API's. The return value to Sugar Labs will be testing and feedback about the current web activities framework. I'm worried that it is quite late in the life of the web activities framework for this feedback, but better late than never. I think we are still veary Sorry, keyboard acting up. I think we are still very early in the life of the web activities framework. I can't think of a single API that we could consider set in stones. -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 10:12:52PM +0100, Daniel Narvaez wrote: I think we are still very early in the life of the web activities framework. I can't think of a single API that we could consider set in stones. Thanks, correction accepted. I was speculating. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Excuse me butting in this talk , but as they are addressing the issue of design, I think it's a good time to reiterate some proposals I have made several times. I think Sugar would do very well a change in appearance and in some cases functionality. I say it should be graphically attractive to users and some operational details should be improved. Is that there are a theoretical foundation behind the Sugar GUI , however I think it should be revised to give more importance to aesthetics. From the point of view of functionality , I think there are small graphical details that make it look that works very slow sugar such as how options are displayed implementation of activities in the home view . I think it should be changes to the user experience more enjoyable in this regard. To be more clear: I mean that the user has a cute sight and efficient execution. Other complexing functionalities require more work and knowledge, such as in the case of the shared network. It would be good to improve the code so that the developer only activities need to call two or three sugar api functions to get the functionality of the network share from my point of view is one of the best things that has sugar , but unfortunately it complicated and confusing when using this feature in applications. Disculpen que me entrometa en esta charla, pero como están tratando el tema de diseño, creo que es un buen momento para reiterar algunas propuestas que he hecho en varias oportunidades. Pienso que a Sugar le haría muy bien un cambio de apariencia y en algunos casos de funcionalidad. Yo digo que gráficamente debiera ser más atractiva para los usuarios y algunos detalles de funcionamiento debieran ser mejorados. Se que hay toda una fundamentación teórica detrás de la interfaz gráfica de sugar, sin embargo pienso que debe ser revisada, para darle más importancia a la estética. Desde el punto de vista de la funcionalidad, creo que hay pequeños detalles gráficos que hacen que parezca que sugar funciona muy lento como por ejemplo la forma en que se despliegan las opciones de ejecución de las actividades en la vista hogar. Pienso que debieran hacerse cambios para que la experiencia del usuario sea más agradable en este sentido. Para ser más claro: me refiero a que el usuario tenga un sistema lindo a la vista y eficiente en la ejecución. Otras funcionalidades más complejas requieren más trabajo y conocimiento, como en el caso de la red compartida. Sería bueno mejorar ese código para que el desarrollador de actividades solo necesite llamar a dos o tres funciones del api de sugar para obtener la funcionalidad de la red compartida que desde mi punto de vista es una de las mejores cosas que tiene sugar, pero lamentablemente es complicado y confuso a la hora de utilizar esta característica en las aplicaciones. 2013/11/1 James Cameron qu...@laptop.org On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 10:12:52PM +0100, Daniel Narvaez wrote: I think we are still very early in the life of the web activities framework. I can't think of a single API that we could consider set in stones. Thanks, correction accepted. I was speculating. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Flavio, Would be good have concrete proposals about what you think can be improved, to be discussed point by point. About a easier implementation of collaboration, we discussed a proposal, and I think Agustin started a implementation. Gonzalo On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Flavio Danesse fdane...@gmail.com wrote: Excuse me butting in this talk , but as they are addressing the issue of design, I think it's a good time to reiterate some proposals I have made several times. I think Sugar would do very well a change in appearance and in some cases functionality. I say it should be graphically attractive to users and some operational details should be improved. Is that there are a theoretical foundation behind the Sugar GUI , however I think it should be revised to give more importance to aesthetics. From the point of view of functionality , I think there are small graphical details that make it look that works very slow sugar such as how options are displayed implementation of activities in the home view . I think it should be changes to the user experience more enjoyable in this regard. To be more clear: I mean that the user has a cute sight and efficient execution. Other complexing functionalities require more work and knowledge, such as in the case of the shared network. It would be good to improve the code so that the developer only activities need to call two or three sugar api functions to get the functionality of the network share from my point of view is one of the best things that has sugar , but unfortunately it complicated and confusing when using this feature in applications. Disculpen que me entrometa en esta charla, pero como están tratando el tema de diseño, creo que es un buen momento para reiterar algunas propuestas que he hecho en varias oportunidades. Pienso que a Sugar le haría muy bien un cambio de apariencia y en algunos casos de funcionalidad. Yo digo que gráficamente debiera ser más atractiva para los usuarios y algunos detalles de funcionamiento debieran ser mejorados. Se que hay toda una fundamentación teórica detrás de la interfaz gráfica de sugar, sin embargo pienso que debe ser revisada, para darle más importancia a la estética. Desde el punto de vista de la funcionalidad, creo que hay pequeños detalles gráficos que hacen que parezca que sugar funciona muy lento como por ejemplo la forma en que se despliegan las opciones de ejecución de las actividades en la vista hogar. Pienso que debieran hacerse cambios para que la experiencia del usuario sea más agradable en este sentido. Para ser más claro: me refiero a que el usuario tenga un sistema lindo a la vista y eficiente en la ejecución. Otras funcionalidades más complejas requieren más trabajo y conocimiento, como en el caso de la red compartida. Sería bueno mejorar ese código para que el desarrollador de actividades solo necesite llamar a dos o tres funciones del api de sugar para obtener la funcionalidad de la red compartida que desde mi punto de vista es una de las mejores cosas que tiene sugar, pero lamentablemente es complicado y confuso a la hora de utilizar esta característica en las aplicaciones. 2013/11/1 James Cameron qu...@laptop.org On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 10:12:52PM +0100, Daniel Narvaez wrote: I think we are still very early in the life of the web activities framework. I can't think of a single API that we could consider set in stones. Thanks, correction accepted. I was speculating. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers. This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains: to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:10:40AM -0700, Sameer Verma wrote: [...] We are seeing continued adoption of the XO in Rwanda (I hear Rwanda is 1.75, but not 4) and Australia. [...] I can confirm that Rwanda is using XO-1.75, not XO-4. You can find this information, albeit without quantities, in the Manufacturing Data table on the Wiki, for SKU234 and SKU235. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manufacturing_data At the moment, both XO-1.75 and XO-4 can be mass produced. (XO-1.75 has a cost advantage per child over XO-4, but without touchscreen, and a slightly slower processor. More children can be deployed to for the same overall project budget.) -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations
Hi, Sameer I've tried to sit on my hands in this discussion. I agree with your assessment completely. I had the opportunity to talk with Ruben Rodriguez at the sprint. He has Sugar running (under Ubuntu) on a Nexus 7 and on a standard PC. I have one of each to test this. The Nexus 7 together with a bluetooth keyboard and holder makes a reasonable physical package. I found a refurbished Gateway identical to my netbook at less than $200. I plan to use that also for testing. My previous netbook (Asus eeepc which has since become unable had Ubuntu installed on top of Windows (using the D: drive space). I installed it with wubi which enables Windows and Ubuntu to be dual-booted (by grub which pushes Windows down to the slot below the memory test). I hope this setup will work with Sugar. In effect, it is possible that deployments can use Classmates or Android tabllets (with a keyboard) as alternatives to XOs going forward. Yours, Tony On 10/31/2013 07:04 PM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote: So, with regard to the points above, several concerns along these lines were voiced at OLPC SF Summit. Most of these were in private corridor/coffee conversations, but I got to hear a bulk of it, being the lead organizer. Opinions and concerns varied from I'm confused by what OLPC is doing, to Are we not doing XOs anymore? to What about Sugar? to It was good ride, but it's over. Time to move along. Two other points to note for this year's meeting: The attendance was the lowest it's ever been, and we barely saw anyone pull out their XOs to work with. Neither observations were encouraging, to put it mildly. My understanding of the XO Tablet project was that it was designed as a revenue generator ($x per unit sale goes to OLPC A) so that work on the XO-4 could continue. In my own conversations with OLPCA, I was always reassured that the XO continues to be the pedagogical machine. However, I'm not seeing the evidence to that end from OLPCA. Pretty much all the staff that worked on the XO are either laid off or have quit. There were other conversations at OLPC SF Summit, where the concern was that OLPCA is quietly trying to convert requests for XO-4 purchases into XO Tablet purchases. I've raised this issue of device cannibalization with OLPCA. If the real plan is to keep both lines going, then the devices should have separate marketing and sales plans. Keep in mind that the XO4 has had close to zero marketing, and all the media I see about OLPC these days usually positions the XO Tablet as the new thing. Today's Wired article makes the intentions clearer: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/31/olpc-and-datawind-tablet So, is the XO-4 dead? My first reaction would be No, although I'm still to very confident of my own assessment. We are seeing continued adoption of the XO in Rwanda (I hear Rwanda is 1.75, but not 4) and Australia. They must see some continued value in it, and perhaps that will help in continuing to foster the ecosystem around it. We also have the approx. 3 million machines around the world, and many are still chugging away. Personally, the move within the Sugar community to web services and HTML5 is very encouraging. However, if all that OLPC remains is a vendor of cheap, proprietary Android tablets wrapped in green silicone, then what motivation remains to continue to plug for it? We all have different motivations for working on this project. I'd like to hear more from others. Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. Does the current stance at OLPCA help in furthering this mission? Sameer ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 29 October 2013 20:29, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.comwrote: Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Hi David, I just started a thread about 0.102 focus and features. If you want to get involved defining the upstream roadmap there is your chance! For 0.100 we kept that very very simple, a short list of new features basically. But if you want to contribute with a product specification I think that would be awesome. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 31 October 2013 19:31, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers. This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains: to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform. Both being hardware agnostic and OS agnostic make sense at a certain level. But I feel like Sugar Labs needs one or more well defined flagship products to focus on. That gives us something to market, to test, to design for. The only Sugar based product which has really been successful until now is the XO. And that makes us still very dependent on OLPC strategies. Given the uncertainity of the OLPC situation (or rather it seems pretty certain that their investement on Sugar has been heavily scaled down), I think Sugar Labs should try to come up with another flagship product to focus on. Sugar on Raspberry? Sugar as a cross OS application? Sugar on some custom built (by who?) piece of hardware? I don't know but I feel it's something we will need to figure out. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 October 2013 19:31, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers. This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains: to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform. Both being hardware agnostic and OS agnostic make sense at a certain level. But I feel like Sugar Labs needs one or more well defined flagship products to focus on. That gives us something to market, to test, to design for. The only Sugar based product which has really been successful until now is the XO. And that makes us still very dependent on OLPC strategies. Given the uncertainity of the OLPC situation (or rather it seems pretty certain that their investement on Sugar has been heavily scaled down), I think Sugar Labs should try to come up with another flagship product to focus on. Sugar on Raspberry? Sugar as a cross OS application? Sugar on some custom built (by who?) piece of hardware? I don't know but I feel it's something we will need to figure out. I think we should be having this discussion with the Sugar deployments. They by-and-large remain committed to Sugar even if they are uncertain about the base platform. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 1 November 2013 03:22, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 October 2013 19:31, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers. This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains: to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform. Both being hardware agnostic and OS agnostic make sense at a certain level. But I feel like Sugar Labs needs one or more well defined flagship products to focus on. That gives us something to market, to test, to design for. The only Sugar based product which has really been successful until now is the XO. And that makes us still very dependent on OLPC strategies. Given the uncertainity of the OLPC situation (or rather it seems pretty certain that their investement on Sugar has been heavily scaled down), I think Sugar Labs should try to come up with another flagship product to focus on. Sugar on Raspberry? Sugar as a cross OS application? Sugar on some custom built (by who?) piece of hardware? I don't know but I feel it's something we will need to figure out. I think we should be having this discussion with the Sugar deployments. They by-and-large remain committed to Sugar even if they are uncertain about the base platform. Absolutely! ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Oct 31, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:04 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. The Association continues to have an engineering effort, but it has been completely outsourced (mostly to MorphOSS) and almost entirely concentrated on the XO Learning Software for the tablet for the last six months. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. I have no knowledge about points 1 and 3. My understanding of the XO Tablet project was that it was designed as a revenue generator ($x per unit sale goes to OLPC A) so that work on the XO-4 could continue. In my own conversations with OLPCA, I was always reassured that the XO continues to be the pedagogical machine. However, I'm not seeing the evidence to that end from OLPCA. Pretty much all the staff that worked on the XO are either laid off or have quit. There were other conversations at OLPC SF Summit, where the concern was that OLPCA is quietly trying to convert requests for XO-4 purchases into XO Tablet purchases. I've raised this issue of device cannibalization with OLPCA. If the real plan is to keep both lines going, then the devices should have separate marketing and sales plans. Keep in mind that the XO4 has had close to zero marketing, and all the media I see about OLPC these days usually positions the XO Tablet as the new thing. Today's Wired article makes the intentions clearer: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/31/olpc-and-datawind-tablet However, if all that OLPC remains is a vendor of cheap, proprietary Android tablets wrapped in green silicone, then what motivation remains to continue to plug for it? We all have different motivations for working on this project. I'd like to hear more from others. OLPC was never about making cheap products --- it was about making a good product at the lowest possible cost. The Vivitar (XO) Tablet and the software associated with it are a complete departure from OLPC's previous engineering practices (and despite the marketing, had no input from the then-existing OLPC team.) Unfortunately, as you point out, there is little effort to market the XO-4 and instead a bewildering push to sell the Vivitar (XO) Tablet to large deployments despite its unsuitability for such.OLPC and I parted ways at the end of September. There are plenty of vendors of cheap Android tablets. Perhaps Walter is right that this is the time to concentrate on providing software designed for collaborative, joyful, advertising-free, self-empowered learning, in a hardware independent manner. The seven years since OLPC started have seen a huge improvement in MIPS/Watt and MIPS/$, making the hardware independent approach (Python, Java, HTML5) an even better approach. Regards, wad ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Indeed, deployments (both administrators and users) have much to contribute to Sugar and the XO's community. The challenge here was how to get and manage such tremendous amount of feedback? Back in November of 2011, we (the Peruvian Local Lab) made an open call to the community addressing this and other issues. We ended up designing and implementing the Sugar Network / Red Azúcar [1]. El principal objetivo de la Red es proveer un ambiente que permita a los participantes crear, compartir y mejorar recursos educativos digitales libres y abiertos. Inicialmente, los recursos podrán ser Artículos, Archivos, Actividades de Sugar o Artefactos creados desde las actividades de Sugar. Today, thanks to the efforts of the Sugar Labs Platform Team and the generous contributions of some community members, we have Beta OS images for XO1 and XO1.5 that include access to the Sugar Network. Of course there is still much to do in order to take this support-social-content-exchange platform up to its potential, so please do not hesitate to give us a hand in any way you can. Best regards, [1] http://pe.sugarlabs.org/go/Red_Az%C3%BAcar 2013/10/31 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 31 October 2013 19:31, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder: Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers. This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains: to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform. Both being hardware agnostic and OS agnostic make sense at a certain level. But I feel like Sugar Labs needs one or more well defined flagship products to focus on. That gives us something to market, to test, to design for. The only Sugar based product which has really been successful until now is the XO. And that makes us still very dependent on OLPC strategies. Given the uncertainity of the OLPC situation (or rather it seems pretty certain that their investement on Sugar has been heavily scaled down), I think Sugar Labs should try to come up with another flagship product to focus on. Sugar on Raspberry? Sugar as a cross OS application? Sugar on some custom built (by who?) piece of hardware? I don't know but I feel it's something we will need to figure out. I think we should be having this discussion with the Sugar deployments. They by-and-large remain committed to Sugar even if they are uncertain about the base platform. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Laura V. ID SomosAZUCAR.Org Identi.ca/Skype acaire IRC kaametza Happy Learning! ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 29/10/2013, at 11:14 AM, David Farning wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. Interesting. I don't recall hearing this. If it was a serious concern backed by evidence I would have expected to receive a direction on it. I conclude it was speculation and not a formal direction, or it was not communicated to me as a direction. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Sounds great to me! On Tuesday, 29 October 2013, David Farning wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.comjavascript:; wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap). -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Daniel Narvaez ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
David, I agree with James. I never heard something like that, is a big accusation, and really do not help to move things forward. As I was in the Sugar team of OLPC Association for the last 3 years, I am absolutely sure we didn't have any direction about that, and every decision was based on code quality or other technical reasons. You may think code is usually accepted as is, but that is not true. Almost every significant piece, receive suggestions and change requests, and after 4 or 5 proposals is accepted when all the requests are fulfilled. Gonzalo On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:40 AM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: On 29/10/2013, at 11:14 AM, David Farning wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. Interesting. I don't recall hearing this. If it was a serious concern backed by evidence I would have expected to receive a direction on it. I conclude it was speculation and not a formal direction, or it was not communicated to me as a direction. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. Ahem. You are casting fugly accusations, you can't stand back and thank everyone for their valuable feedback. 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. Doing is the wrong word, AFAICS. Did anyone working for OLPC _who was a maintainer to SL's trees_ ever rejected or actively ignored patches like what you say? The list of candidates is very short, and they are all highly ethical professionals. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap). -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Devel mailing list de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
2013/10/29 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. I totally agree. This needs more clarification from your side, David. As a maintainer who was under contract with olpc I feel attacked. We had difficult times and many comings and goings when raw patches appeared, yes (specially during the GTK3 port). But that was because of the nature of our workflow, which hopefully has improved. Proof of that is that we have zero patches on queue, as Daniel said. It would be foolish to bypass good patches with improvements or bugfixes. And certainly I wasn't told to do so. And as Daniel said also, the openness of our community simply doesn't allow it, as anyone can be a reviewer. -- .. manuq .. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. Agreed, let's do it step wise: Phase one -- Code and Roger will will start on the HTML5 + JS work with Daniel and Manq. Daniel has struck me as 'fair but firm.' On Activity Central's side, we are probably not going to incorporate that work in customer facing products for 6-9 months. Thus, it can be a trial of AC supporting upstream on innovative work without subjecting upstream the to changing desires of customers. Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Phase three -- Let's look at some mechanism for balancing the need to push the project forward through innovation and support existing deployments by providing stability. David -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap).
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
About phase two: What is wrong with our actual Feature process? About topics you are not talking, I would like AC spend some time trying to push features upstream. That was almost not done in the last year, and I am working on that right now, but would be good some help from your part. Gonzalo On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:29 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. Agreed, let's do it step wise: Phase one -- Code and Roger will will start on the HTML5 + JS work with Daniel and Manq. Daniel has struck me as 'fair but firm.' On Activity Central's side, we are probably not going to incorporate that work in customer facing products for 6-9 months. Thus, it can be a trial of AC supporting upstream on innovative work without subjecting upstream the to changing desires of customers. Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Phase three -- Let's look at some mechanism for balancing the need to push the project forward through innovation and support existing deployments by providing stability. David -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: About phase two: What is wrong with our actual Feature process? There is nothing wrong with the feature process. The project specification ( please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Community_Edition/0.4/Project_Specifications ) is supplemental to the feature process. It the case of Sugar I would expect that features end of taking the place of services. The goal is to create a single point of reference where people with different backgrounds, interests, and levels of participation can see how they fit into the big picture. About topics you are not talking, I would like AC spend some time trying to push features upstream. That was almost not done in the last year, and I am working on that right now, but would be good some help from your part. I was hoping to sit on this for a while. Internally we are restructuring our Dextrose team around providing long term support across multiple platforms. Short term this means building our team. Mid term this means aligning AC's git repo as branches on the Sugar Labs github repo. Long term the goal is that AC will actively participate in maintaining a long term release of upstream Sugar. My thinking was that as organizations we can build trust (on both side) by working on the easier tasks of 1 and 2. In the meantime AC's internal Dextrose team can figure out enough of a strategy so that when we present something to the community we are not talking about half baked ideas and showing half baked code Cause lets be honest. If after this thread AC shows up with crap, you and any other Sugar Labs hacker will kick AC out on our asses, and we would deserve it. I am happy to revisit this, but I would like to clarify our organizational priorities and why we chose them. Gonzalo On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:29 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? Proposals aside (of course more eyes and hands would be appreciated) there is still the underlying issue of mistrust that you have raised. I think it is important that we clear the air and I think it is not unreasonable to ask you to be specific about your perceptions that somehow Sugar Labs is not acting in a transparent manner. Agreed, let's do it step wise: Phase one -- Code and Roger will will start on the HTML5 + JS work with Daniel and Manq. Daniel has struck me as 'fair but firm.' On Activity Central's side, we are probably not going to incorporate that work in customer facing products for 6-9 months. Thus, it can be a trial of AC supporting upstream on innovative work without subjecting upstream the to changing desires of customers. Phase two -- Let's look at lessons learned from other projects. We can focus on the road map and product specification. From my experience, these two piece can provide an anchor for the rest of the project: 1. The act of sitting down and hashing out the roadmap and project specification causes everyone to sit back and assess their individual priorities and goals and how they fit into the project as a whole. 2. The act of deciding which items are above the line and which are below the line, which are targeted for this release and which are pushed to a future release, help find the balance between what is possible some day and what is probable in X months of work with existing resources. 3. Sitting back and preparing for a release forces us to asses what is good enough for release what is not. It is a good feedback loop. 4. Finally, after a successful release everyone can sit back bask is the satisfaction that maybe we didn't save the world... but we make enough progress that it is worth getting up again tomorrow and doing it all again. Phase three -- Let's look at some mechanism for balancing the need to push the project forward through innovation and support existing deployments by providing stability. David -walter On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 23 October 2013 19:51, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] I don't understand what you are asking. Sugar Labs has always had a policy of working in the open. The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Not a clue as to what you are talking about. How about some transparency as to what our disagreement is? [snip] Yes, please. I don't really understand where you are seeing lack of openness and transparency. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. You also stated: The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Several of us have asked for an explanation. regards. -walter Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
David wrote: The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. I haven't been able to parse this in a way that gives me confidence that I comprehend it. Assessing the degree of openness and transparency is very difficult, because it depends on the monitoring of communication, and there are communications that are private. The social network also contains nodes that are hidden. Some of the communication links are hidden. Some links are by broadcast. I think this will always be so. It is how humans organise their networks; ad-hoc and badly. It is why governance systems are implemented. I speculate that the assessments of the degree of openness and transparency occupy a broad band, and that David has an assessment some distance from the median. Walter wrote: Several of us have asked for an explanation. I agree. I'd like to know more about the assessment and the basis for it. At the moment I don't perceive any problems with the governance of Sugar Labs. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. You also stated: The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Several of us have asked for an explanation. Yes, and sorry about the delay. This is a nuanced discussion which requires focusing on goals which can strengthen the project while avoiding recriminations about the past mistakes and individual weakness. The general observation is that open source projects are most effective when they provide a venue for multiple individuals and organizations with overlapping yet non-identical goals to come together to collaborate on a common platform which they can use and adapt for their own purpose. The specific observation about Sugar Labs is that an emphasis on identical goals tends to limit active participants. Outliers tend to be nudged aside. The remaining group of active participants are small but loyal. And yes, I see the irony of posting this observation on the sugar-devel mailing list. Everyone who is troubled by this observation has already left. As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. I have tried to communicate that there is competition between organizations and deployments within the ecosystem... and that is good. Competition drives innovation. The challenge, as I see it, is for Sugar Labs to become the to common collaborative ground around which these organizations compete. Hope that helps. regards. -walter Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 8:14 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:01 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. +1 on Walter's words, David's position is overstated. OLPC has shrunk its Sugar investment, that is true. But on the other points, nothing has changed significantly, OLPC has always had to find sources of funding. As I stated, I hope to be proven wrong. You also stated: The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Several of us have asked for an explanation. Yes, and sorry about the delay. This is a nuanced discussion which requires focusing on goals which can strengthen the project while avoiding recriminations about the past mistakes and individual weakness. The general observation is that open source projects are most effective when they provide a venue for multiple individuals and organizations with overlapping yet non-identical goals to come together to collaborate on a common platform which they can use and adapt for their own purpose. The specific observation about Sugar Labs is that an emphasis on identical goals tends to limit active participants. Outliers tend to be nudged aside. The remaining group of active participants are small but loyal. And yes, I see the irony of posting this observation on the sugar-devel mailing list. Everyone who is troubled by this observation has already left. As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. It seems unwise to damn Sugar Labs based on hearsay from OLPCA. Sugar Labs is *not* OLPCA and we don't traffic in hearsay, regardless. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Wow. Their email was send 4 days ago, right before the weekend and *after* your assertion that Sugar Labs is somehow remiss in its integrity. This too seems a real stretch. That said, there is clearly something bothering you. It would be good to clear the air. thanks. -walter I have tried to communicate that there is competition between organizations and deployments within the ecosystem... and that is good. Competition drives innovation. The challenge, as I see it, is for Sugar Labs to become the to common collaborative ground around which these organizations compete. Hope that helps. regards. -walter Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. That's more like it ;-) there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. Seeding and supporting projects is how it's done. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org -- David Farning Activity Central:
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 8:14 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. I object very strongly to those statements; I hope it was not under my watch and I goes very much against the grain of everyone involved with Sugar and OLPC in all the time I was there. While I didn't always agree or like AC's work or strategies, I have been, on and off the record, always in favor of having a strong ecosystem. AC being the main player in that space, this translated in a strong advocacy for AC. As a professional in the foss world, this is not something I would accept in my team, and I don't think anyone in the team had the kind of personality to play such games. There were times where it was easy for OLPC to integrate patches, There were times when it was hard. I tried to signal that in advance because I have been on both sides of the integration game (and I continue to be -- now with Moodle) and I profoundly despise games such as the one being suggested. with a bad taste in my mouth, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first ~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.comwrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap). ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
I would like to thank everyone who has provided valuable feedback by participating on this thread. The three things I am going to takeway from the the thread are: 1. Jame's point about my position about not representing the median. Due to my history and role in the ecosystem, I have upset some apple-carts :( 2. Martin's point about the right hand not always being aware of what the left hand is doing. This unfortunately seems to happen too frequently. 3. Finally, and most importantly, Daniel's point about getting back to the business of improving Sugar. My proposal is that Activity Central make the next step of funding two developers to work on HTML5 and JS. If we can find a mutually beneficial relationship around this, we can see how we can expand the relationship in the future. Seem reasonable? On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 October 2013 01:14, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: As two Data points: In a private conversation with an Association employee they told me that they conciser Activity Central a competitor because Activity Central increased deployments expectations. Their strategy with regard to Activity Central was to _not_ accept patches upstream with the goal of causing Activity Central and Dextrose to collapse under its their weight. As it was private conversation I am not sure how widely spread the opinion was held. The patch queue is currently empty. In the last six months only one patchset was rejected. It was by Activity Central and it was rejected by me (not an OLPC employee) for purely technical reasons. The proof being that the same patchset landed after being cleaned up and resubmitted properly by another Activity Central developer. More in general, no single developer is in charge of patch reviewing, OLPC couldn't keep code out of the tree for non-technical reason even if they wanted to. More specifically the ability to approve patches was offered to one Activity Central developer, which never used it. Recently there was a call for help testing HTML5 and JS. Two developers Code and Roger have been writing proof of concept activities. They have been receiving extensive off-list help getting started. But, interestingly, their on-list request for clarification about how to test datastore was met with silence. Mailing list posts going unanswered isn't really uncommon in free software projects. But most of the time it just means that no one knows the answer or everyone is too busy. Only me and Manuel are usually answering about HTML5. I have not answered because... gmail put those messages in my spam folder, sigh! Most likely the same happened to Manuel or he has been busy. (I need to take some sleep now but I'll try to answer asap). -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. While painful, the world is better of with a leaner (and meaner) OLPC Association which lives to fight another day. The challenge moving forward is how to develop and maintain the Sugar platform, the universe of activities, and the supporting distributions given the reduction in patronage from the OLPC Association. I, and AC, would be happy to work more closely with Sugar Labs if there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is frustrating for an upstream software developer. A primary tenet of free and open sources software is that then anyone can use and distribute the software as they see fit as long as the source code is made available. The challenge for an upstream is to create an environment where it is more beneficial for individuals and organizations to work together than it is to work independently. To make things more concrete, three areas of concern are Control, Credit, Money: -- Control -- Are there mechanism for publicly making and communicating project direction in a productive manner? Is disagreement accepted and encouraged? -- Credit -- Are there mechanism for publicly acknowledging who participates and adds value to the ecosystem? Is credit shared freely and fairly? -- Money -- Are there mechanisms in place for publicly acknowledge that money pays a role in the ecosystem? Is Sugar Labs able to maintain a neutral base around which people and organizations can collaborate? From my limited experience, I don't believe there is an single holy grail type answer to any of these questions. Instead, the answers tend to evolve as situations change and participants come and go. On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out.
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. While painful, the world is better of with a leaner (and meaner) OLPC Association which lives to fight another day. The challenge moving forward is how to develop and maintain the Sugar platform, the universe of activities, and the supporting distributions given the reduction in patronage from the OLPC Association. I, and AC, would be happy to work more closely with Sugar Labs if there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. I don't understand what you are asking. Sugar Labs has always had a policy of working in the open. That said, Sugar Labs volunteers (yes, we are all volunteers), have on occasion done consulting for OLPC, AC, deployments, and other third parties. Nothing new or unusual about that either. The future of Sugar is incumbant upon its remaining relevant to learning and its maintaining a vibrant upstream community. If you (and AC) want to contribute to the future of Sugar, please work with us upstream, e.g. report bugs upstream, submit patches upstream, test code originating upstream, mentor newbies, etc. Par for the course for any FOSS project. On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is frustrating for an upstream software developer. A primary tenet of free and open sources software is that then anyone can use and distribute the software as they see fit as long as the source code is made available. The challenge for an upstream is to create an environment where it is more beneficial for individuals and organizations to work together than it is to work independently. To make things
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:04 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: I just wanted to bump this line of questions as, it is the critical set of questions which will determine the future viability of Sugar. If anyone as more informed, please correct me if I am sharing incorrect information: 1. The Association has dropped future development of XO laptops and Sugar as part of their long term strategy. I base this on the reduction of hardware and software personal employed by the Association. 2. The Association is reducing its roll within the engineering and development side of the ecosystem. I base this on the shift toward integrating existing technology, software, and content from other vendors on the XO tablet. 3. The Association is shifting away from its initial roll as a technical philanthropy to a revenue generating organization structured as a association. I base this on the general shift in conversations and decisions from public to private channels. I don't speak on behalf of the Association, but I think your positions are overstated. I hope to be proven wrong and the laptop side of the Association regains momentum. As far as I know, the Association is still pursing sales of XO laptops and is still supporting XO laptops in the field. Granted the pace of development is slowed and there is -- to my knowledge -- no team in place to develop an follow up to the XO 4.0. I don't have a clue as to what you mean by a technical philanthropy but it remains a non-profit associated dedicated to enhancing learning opportunities through one-to-one computing. The fact that the Association has private-sector partners is nothing new. It has had such partners since its founding in 2006. Given financial constraints, these are reasonable shifts. While painful, the world is better of with a leaner (and meaner) OLPC Association which lives to fight another day. The challenge moving forward is how to develop and maintain the Sugar platform, the universe of activities, and the supporting distributions given the reduction in patronage from the OLPC Association. I, and AC, would be happy to work more closely with Sugar Labs if there are ways to establish publicly disclosed and mutually beneficial relationships. In the meantime we are happy to provide deployments support while seeding and supporting projects we feel are beneficial to deployments such as School Server Community Edition and Sugar on Ubuntu. I don't understand what you are asking. Sugar Labs has always had a policy of working in the open. The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. That said, Sugar Labs volunteers (yes, we are all volunteers), have on occasion done consulting for OLPC, AC, deployments, and other third parties. Nothing new or unusual about that either. The future of Sugar is incumbant upon its remaining relevant to learning and its maintaining a vibrant upstream community. If you (and AC) want to contribute to the future of Sugar, please work with us upstream, e.g. report bugs upstream, submit patches upstream, test code originating upstream, mentor newbies, etc. Par for the course for any FOSS project. On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: [snip] I don't understand what you are asking. Sugar Labs has always had a policy of working in the open. The degree of openness and transparency is our fundamental disagreement. Best case is that the status quo works, Sugar Labs thrives, and I am proven wrong. Worst case is that Sugar adopts to the changing environment. Not a clue as to what you are talking about. How about some transparency as to what our disagreement is? [snip] -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If someone, individuals or a third party, were willing and able to provide LTS support for a version of Sugar, how would you recommend they go about doing it? With the recent changes to the ecosystem, I am unclear about the current structure, culture, and politics of Sugar Labs. My concern is that in that past several years a number of organization who have participated in Sugar development have left or reduced their participation. When asking them why they left, the most common response is that that they didn't feel they were able to establish or sustain mutually beneficial relationships within the ecosystem. Would you be interesting in looking at cultural, political, and procedural traits which have enabled other free and opensource projects to foster thriving ecosystems? Are these traits present in Sugar Labs? While, I understand it is frustrating for an upstream software developer. A primary tenet of free and open sources software is that then anyone can use and distribute the software as they see fit as long as the source code is made available. The challenge for an upstream is to create an environment where it is more beneficial for individuals and organizations to work together than it is to work independently. To make things more concrete, three areas of concern are Control, Credit, Money: -- Control -- Are there mechanism for publicly making and communicating project direction in a productive manner? Is disagreement accepted and encouraged? -- Credit -- Are there mechanism for publicly acknowledging who participates and adds value to the ecosystem? Is credit shared freely and fairly? -- Money -- Are there mechanisms in place for publicly acknowledge that money pays a role in the ecosystem? Is Sugar Labs able to maintain a neutral base around which people and organizations can collaborate? From my limited experience, I don't believe there is an single holy grail type answer to any of these questions. Instead, the answers tend to evolve as situations change and participants come and go. On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out. This can take months, even years. This directly conflicts with the rapid innovation cycle of development used by effective up streams. Good projects constantly improve and refine their speed of innovation. Is is desirable, or even possible, to create a project where these two overlapping yet non-identical needs can be balanced? As a concrete example we could look at the pros and cons of a stable long term support sugar release lead by quick, leading edge releases. For full disclosure, I tried to start this same conversation several years ago. I failed: 1. I did not have the credibility to be take seriously. 2. I did not have the political, social, and technical experience to understand the nuances of engaging with the various parties in the ecosystem. 3. I did not have the emotional control to assertively advocate ideas without aggressively advocating opinions. Has enough changed in the past several years to make it valuable to revisit this conversation publicly? On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out. This can take months, even years. This directly conflicts with the rapid innovation cycle of development used by effective up streams. Good projects constantly improve and refine their speed of innovation. Is is desirable, or even possible, to create a project where these two overlapping yet non-identical needs can be balanced? As a concrete example we could look at the pros and cons of a stable long term support sugar release lead by quick, leading edge releases. For full disclosure, I tried to start this same conversation several years ago. I failed: 1. I did not have the credibility to be take seriously. 2. I did not have the political, social, and technical experience to understand the nuances of engaging with the various parties in the ecosystem. 3. I did not have the emotional control to assertively advocate ideas without aggressively advocating opinions. Has enough changed in the past several years to make it valuable to revisit this conversation publicly? On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
I agree with your analysis about slow deployment updates versus fast community cycles. In my view, there are two alternatives: * We can slow down a little the Sugar cycle, may be doing one release by year, but I am not sure if will help. The changes will take more time to go to the users? If a deployment miss a update, will need wait a entire year? * Someone can work in a LTS Sugar. That should be good if they can push the fixes they work upstream while they are working in their own project. If I was a deployment working with a 3th party, I would ask every fix will be pushed upstream, to be sure I will not have the same problem in 6 months or a year, but I am sure the deployments do not know how the community and open source projects in general work. Gonzalo On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: For phase one this openness in communication, I would like to open the discussion to strategies for working together. My interest is how to deal with the notion of overlapping yet non-identical goals. As a case study, let's look at deployment and developer preferences for stability and innovation. The roll out pipeline for a deployment can be long: 1. Core development. 2. Core validation.. 3. Activity development. 4. Activity validation. 5. Update documentation. 6. Update training materials. 7. Pilot. 8. Roll-out. This can take months, even years. This directly conflicts with the rapid innovation cycle of development used by effective up streams. Good projects constantly improve and refine their speed of innovation. Is is desirable, or even possible, to create a project where these two overlapping yet non-identical needs can be balanced? As a concrete example we could look at the pros and cons of a stable long term support sugar release lead by quick, leading edge releases. For full disclosure, I tried to start this same conversation several years ago. I failed: 1. I did not have the credibility to be take seriously. 2. I did not have the political, social, and technical experience to understand the nuances of engaging with the various parties in the ecosystem. 3. I did not have the emotional control to assertively advocate ideas without aggressively advocating opinions. Has enough changed in the past several years to make it valuable to revisit this conversation publicly? On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
David, Certainly is good know plans, and started a interesting discussion. In eduJam and in Montevideo, I was talking with the new AC hackers, and tried to convince them to work on sugar 0.100 instead of sugar 0.98. Have a lot of sense try to work in the same code if possible, and will be good for your plans of work on web activities. May be we can look at the details, but I agree with you, we should try avoid fragmentation. Gonzalo On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 2:56 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.
and I apologize for that. Unity in diversity is a necessity for the success of global projects addressing communities and civil society. It is always great to see all the members of an eco-system working towards a common goal. Regards, Manu On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 11:26 PM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: Over the past couple of weeks there has been an interesting thread which started from AC's attempt to clarify our priorities for the next couple of months. One of the most interesting aspects has been the interplay between private/political vs. public/vision discussions. There seem to be several people and organizations with overlapping yet slightly different goals. Is there interest in seeing how these people and organizations can work together towards a common goal? Are we happy with the current degree of fragmentation? I fully admit my role in the current fragmentation. One of the reasons I started AC was KARMA. At the time I was frustrated because I felt that ideas such as karma were being judged on who controlled or received credit for them instead of their value to deployments. We hired several key sugar hackers and forked Sugar to work on the problem. While effective at creating a third voice in the ecosystem, (The association has shifted more effort towards supporting deployments and Sugar Labs via OLPC-AU is up streaming many of our deployment specific patches) my approach was heavy handed and indulgent... and I apologize for that. -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
