Over the last weeks I have been looking at how we can improve our release cycle. Today will be about defining and implementing goals.
Setting goals for any software project is hard, much less an open source project. Marco started the discussion last week at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007838.html . He has also started a wiki page at http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84 . There seem to be as many methods for setting goals as there are projects. There is not a best practice. Some of the variables are: 1. Size of the project. Larger project such as eclipse have developed very formal methods. Smaller project tend to be more informal. 2. Collaboration vs. Competition. Projects differ in the attitudes with which stakeholders regard each other. 3. Commercial vs. Commons. Project differ with regards to their interest in commercializing their product. 4. Dictator vs. Membership. Some project such as the kernel do well with the BD others such as Debian are entirely membership driven. 5. Planned vs. Evolutionary. 1. Sugar Labs in in the category of small to medium sized. We have less than 10 committers responsible for 90% on the commits and less then 50 doing the majority of the majority of the commits. This size implies a less formal method of setting goals. It is still quite easy for all developers to coordinate on a single ML and use wiki pages to specify new features. 2. All of the current stake holds all share the same basic vision for Sugar. We should be able to decide on goals and priorities of goals based on rough consensus. If an individual stakeholder has an interest in add a feature, it is up to them to implement and prove the value of a given feature. 3. We are a hybrid of commercial and commons. Our base product, the Sugar desktop, is focused on the common good. Yet, it will be to our advantage to encourage organizations to advance Sugar as a platform on which to base their own businesses. 4. Base on some of the recent hits Sugar has taken in the media, public trust for sugar is quite low. Returning to a dictator, regardless of his competence or benevolence is questionable. 5. For a totally cop-out answer I will fall back on planned evolution. Proposal: 1. Continue the discussion that Marco started on [EMAIL PROTECTED] . 2. Submit suggestions for future development via http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84 . 3. Appoint Marco and Greg Smith to assign priorities to the list of suggestions. 4. Individuals volunteer to work on features. thanks dfarning _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
