Hi Ben, I value your technical achievements and your contributions on the list so thanks for raising the topic!
I believe Tomeu is a polyglot and he keeps track of user feedback in addition to being a great engineer. On the Acoustic Measure + Mesh problem, I may know who posted that and can send you his e-mail off list. You can also post to their wiki comments page and to the Peru list [EMAIL PROTECTED] No one has complained when I post there in pidgin Spanish, but I can find someone to translate if you prefer. In terms of connecting users and developers, I hope that will become a core competency of OLPC. I think its central to unlocking the potential of the open source community. If we get this right (many users co-developing many applications with many developers) OLPC will have an unrivalled development capacity. Until then we're up against the "Mythical Man Month" (MMM) and so are the users. I've worked on the XO user <-> engineering communication problem for 6 months but I don't know the complete answer yet. I'm open to your suggestions but there are already many places where people communicate. Too many for developers to watch them all (MMM again). E.g. there are two forums (en.forum.laptop.org and olpc news), OLPC Wiki, many e-mail lists, [EMAIL PROTECTED], user generated sites, etc. I think we get good feedback from English speakers on the wiki and e-mail lists. If you want more English feedback you can try starting a thread asking for input about your activity on the forum: http://en.forum.laptop.org/ The forum managers asked for more engagement from the development community in a recent Support Gang meeting. The main non-English input I have seen is coming in via user blogs. I have a list of them on my talk page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio Many non-English users are just starting to use computers. They don't yet post to e-mail lists or Wiki pages. Some will but it takes pushing and you need a site in their language. I doubt they will use Trac. For non-English contacts one solution is to find a lead bilingual technical contact who is close to the users. Help that person and you can develop a good source of feedback. Be careful what you wish for :-). Development wont be able to keep up with all the user input if we see a flood of feedback (Uruguay and Nepal are just getting underway). One solution is to assign a lead person from the list to spend a fraction of their time focused on each major site. Those people can build relationships and monitor user input then extract major themes for the devel list. Also, if a developer wants input on an activity or design they can ask the lead contact. I have relationships now with teachers in Peru and Uruguay if you have a question for them send it over. Waveplace in the Caribbean and Nepal are also easy to contact. Hopefully the communication systems will grow organically. We can help get it started and try to direct it so it doesn't overwhelm users or developers. The key is to offer value and support as the first step. Then ask questions later. The other main point is to get the users involved before you develop the software. If you have a great idea, just go for it. However, if you want input from users, its better to get buy in for your application in advance and build the user relationship up front. In any case, its real work to get meaningful user feedback and one to one interaction is still the best. Try working with this teacher in Peru to get a sense of what it will take. Let us know how it goes and let me know if I can help get you started. HTHs. Thanks, Greg S -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tomeu Vizoso Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 8:36 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Greg Smith (gregmsmi); devel@lists.laptop.org Subject: Re: Acoustic Measure Problem On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 5:47 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There is a much larger point here, though. I would love to get more > (any!) feedback from teachers about my code, so I know what's > important in the field. Until you mentioned this page, I had no idea that it existed. > ~ I'm sure many other developers feel the same way. It seems that > the teachers want to give us feedback too, but somehow, the loop is not closing. > > We need to connect this feedback loop. We need a way to get > complaints back from the field into the hands of developers, like > I've suggested in #6950. We've talked about translating Trac, but if > Trac is too complicated, then perhaps we need to set up an RT list: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] Maybe also a simple webform at > inconvenientes.laptop.org, for those with web access but no e-mail. > Then we need to tell the teachers that these things exist, and make > them understand that we really do want to hear about what they don't like. > > I want to hear complaints about my software, and then I want a way to > open a dialogue with those who are having problems. This is the > first step toward improving open systems. I like your suggestions, two questions: - What would be done with the info submitted? Could there be an automatic process or someone would need to manually triage and send to trac/mailing lists? - How we could get back to the submitter? Thanks, Tomeu _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel