Carrying on a fine tradition of July-based Sugar reflections [1, 2], I'm going to offer some mostly unsolicited advice. (Sorry, Tomeu, but you asked me to write. :^)
Dear Sugar Labs, In the past year, you succeeded in removing two important barriers to entry for new developers: you have created a distinctive brand and you freed Sugar from the XO. What's next? Here's a four-part RFC: 1. Could we embrace POSIX and the RESTful Web throughout our software [3]? POSIX and HTTP are the mother tongues of our ecosystem and developer base. By embracing them, we make our software much cheaper to explore and to modify. 2. Could we live more within our packaging? This way, our packaging gets tested more quickly, we become more expert /at/ packaging, we make friends in our distros, we get better packaging, and our releases become easier! 3. Could we make ourselves more interesting to be around, for example by saying "maybe we could..." or "I have... (and you can too...!)" more frequently than we say "I can't."? Our strengths lie in our big, sexy, /powerful/ ideas. We can't shrink from these ideas; they sparked our desire to contribute and they will do so for others. (Otherwise, we will fade.) 4. We could do more to help one another to develop as may be necessary to advance those big, sexy ideas. (Anecdote: I don't think any of us here today started off understanding much about communities, UI design, networking, release management, quality assurance, or large-scale coding; I just see lots of people who looked for people who were smarter and more knowledgable than they were and who worked really hard to catch up. We should do more of that.) xoxoxo, Michael P.S. - In the spirit of walking the walk, I'll also share one of my own recent puny efforts in the direction outlined above: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network2 Regards, Michael [1]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007304.html [2]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html [3]: (With suitable hacks under the covers of FUSE and DNS.) _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep