Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 1:56 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.comwrote: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. I don't disagree, but I would qualify that: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys by changing the game. This is why I maintain that GNU/Linux distros considering each other as competitors is pointless at the end of the day when 92% or so of the desktop/laptop market is running MS Windows. Sean ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 1:56 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.com wrote: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. I don't disagree, but I would qualify that: The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys by changing the game. This is why I maintain that GNU/Linux distros considering each other as competitors is pointless at the end of the day when 92% or so of the desktop/laptop market is running MS Windows. Agreed. That is one of the reasons Google is maintaining such a tight hold on Android. They are trying to maintain the critical mass for the OS by preventing fragmentation. The downside becomes the somewhat extreme, by free software standards, they are using to maintain control of the project. Sean -- 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] different perspectives
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Dear Community, As I was listening to the interviews of some of the OLPC SF Summit attendees, I was amazed at the richness of diversity in perspectives. In spite of being a part of this community since July 2007, and trying to keep up with all that is OLPC and Sugar, these interviews threw me off a bit. The videos are uploading as I write this. They'll be available at https://www.youtube.com/user/olpcsf/videos soon. Bill Stelzer, who usually interviews and runs the camera asks people a handful of questions. So, here's a little community exercise. Why not ask you all the same? 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? After leaving the military, I was searching for something meaningful to do with my life. Over the years, I have become frustrated the the ability for individuals and groups to control others, often for their own benefit, by restricting their access to education and communication. Precursors to the Arab Spring emerged as dissidents used technologies such as cell phones, texting, and email to bypass normal communication restrictions in their region. This brought me to the conclusion that the intersection of rapidly falling hardware prices, rapidly increasing availability of connectivity, and open source software had the potential to be as culturally disruptive as the printing press was in the 1400 and 1500. Somewhere across the line I came across the OLPC project. While the focus of the project was different then my personal goals, the methods, and likely the effects, of OLPC plus Sugar seemed remarkably similar to my personal goals. 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? While frustrating, the project is nudging the world in the right direction. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? The major challenge ( albeit, on a rather abstract level ) is how the ecosystem deals with the issues of Control, Credit, and Money. 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar project(s) could do better? Identify and attempt to fix bottlenecks in the ecosystem which limit the effectiveness of deployments: 1. Create a deployment sponsored distribution, Dextrose, to close the feedback loop between developers and deployment. The Dextrose sustainability model ensures that loop is closed. Fixes and features which go into dextrose are valuable enough that some deployment somewhere is willing to pay for it. 1a. Establish the company-community arms race. While a bit dated there is an excellent talk at https://fossbazaar.org/content/bdale-garbee-collaborating-successfully-large-corporations/ about company and community relationship. Bdale uses the interesting analogy of the arms race to describe the relationship between companies and communities in Open Source development. The Company is constantly trying to add features and fixes which provide them competitive advantage in the market place. The Community is constantly innovating and unwinding the companies competitive advantage and making it available to the community. The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. 2. Establish a effective community-company project, XSCE, to prove that there is nothing inherent in the OLPC/Sugar space which prevents effective community-relationships. Over the last year, we have been following two core principles to build a effective school server community. Welcome people with overlapping but non-identical goals. Build on one another's strength while minimizing the effects of our own weakness. 3. Establish a 'facilitators network' to improve communication between parents, teachers, deployers, and developers. ( Work in Progress) 4. Build on lessons learned in 1,2, and 3 to establish a mutually beneficial relationship between AC and Sugar Labs. Please note, these are intentionally very specific area in which I plan on investing my time and money:) Reply-all in your answers. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ 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] different perspectives
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Dear Community, As I was listening to the interviews of some of the OLPC SF Summit attendees, I was amazed at the richness of diversity in perspectives. In spite of being a part of this community since July 2007, and trying to keep up with all that is OLPC and Sugar, these interviews threw me off a bit. The videos are uploading as I write this. They'll be available at https://www.youtube.com/user/olpcsf/videos soon. Bill Stelzer, who usually interviews and runs the camera asks people a handful of questions. So, here's a little community exercise. Why not ask you all the same? 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? Back in 2005, most of my research was on the user perspective of free and open source software. OLPC was promising to be a rich source. I did not know anything about Sugar, or constructivist learning, or the fact that these machines were largely for children. I was also looking for a way to provide Internet access to my family in Bhagmalpur, India, so my uncle could look up information on farming techniques. I saw an XO at OSCON 2007 for the first time. Rob Savoye (Gnash) was showing it around. OLPC laptops sounded a better alternative to sending old desktops and CRT monitors to Bhagmalpur, so I jumped in. I wrote to the developer program, and Jim Gettys send me an XO! 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? Initially, it was the excitement of a new thing. Then, I started to read up on the educational side of it, and got hooked. I also admired the non-stop ability of the core team to solve difficult problems. They wouldn't take no for an answer, and came up with novel, yet objective ways to solve problems. That zeal, combined with my very own personal barometer in Bhagmalpur kept me plugged (and it still does). OLPC SF became the fun thing to do/focus on locally. Visiting Jamaica on my sabbatical leave was the catalyst for getting a deployment going (now grown to 4 schools). Eventually, I got enough G1G1 XOs to populate Bhagmalpur with 26 XOs in houses across the village. Bringing OLPC/Sugar into my teaching, research and service allows me to work on projects and not simply pursue these projects as a personal interest. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? Over the years, the teams churn through. Each churn takes away some ideas, and replace these with newer ideas. The trouble is with things that get lost between the cycles. Many biases come in with each developer pool, and not all ideas are vetted thoroughly. There was always a lot of mystery about how decisions were made at the company, be it in Cambridge, or at Miami. Not being an employee, I typically resigned to whatever comes down the mailing list pipeline. I understand that outsiders getting in the way of business is difficult, but the OLPC community + company partnership (if there was ever one) never really sat well with me. As OLPC transitioned from the Foundation to the Association, the free and open source went neglected. Management really didn't understand the core of why FOSS was important. They probably saw it as a source of software, but not as an ongoing ecosystem. FOSS does not have strategic significance it should at OLPCA. OLPCF on the other hand, struggled with marketing. I'm not talking about advertising. I'm talking about getting the ideas out so people could understand it easily. Telling people about your ideas at their level of understanding makes a major difference. They couldn't tell the world how important their work was. It didn't translate to the outside. I was at PLoS.org last week, and about a third of the staffers there came up and asked me about what that thing (my XO) was. At least people in this sphere should have known! There was also the blanket refusal to work with boutique projects at OLPCF. That led to a no room for retail mentality. Retailing would have helped. OLPCA on the other hand struggles with strategy. Most of what they do is operational at best. I realize that it is hard to stay the course when the hardware and software industries focus so much on particular combinations (think Android and ARM), but increasingly, the tail is wagging the dog. Letting sales run an organization doesn't last for too long :-( Not being a developer myself, keeping up with Sugar's roadmap has been difficult. These projects are heavily driven by technology. I am used to an environment where the end user has a fair bit of say in the matter, but I never got a good sense of whether Sugar as a project was really getting good input. It's a difficult balance between listening to your users and going the Jobs way (users don't know what they want). I don't perceive these to be transparency issues as much as translation issues - the ideas in people's heads don't make it to the other side. This leads to a large variance in understanding different aspects of the
Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Dear Community, As I was listening to the interviews of some of the OLPC SF Summit attendees, I was amazed at the richness of diversity in perspectives. In spite of being a part of this community since July 2007, and trying to keep up with all that is OLPC and Sugar, these interviews threw me off a bit. The videos are uploading as I write this. They'll be available at https://www.youtube.com/user/olpcsf/videos soon. Bill Stelzer, who usually interviews and runs the camera asks people a handful of questions. So, here's a little community exercise. Why not ask you all the same? 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? I started developing activities because I liked the project and the mission. Later was invited to help start a deployment in my country, and after that was contracted by OLPC to continue developing activities and Sugar. 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? The team is incredible. Every day I learn something, and we have new challenges. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? * Miss-communication between volunteers. * Lack of founding. * New technological landscape (tablets/android) 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar project(s) could do better? I think we need do a strategic analysis of our position, and improve the development of the areas needed by teachers and schools. If OLPC is not a option to distribute Sugar, we could need partner with hardware providers. Gonzalo Reply-all in your answers. cheers, Sameer -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ 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] different perspectives
Great thread idea ! I must answer. 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? I've subscribed to the first G1G1. The laptop was terribly late and I've planned it for my child's birthday so I bought another on eBay. Once I've got the XO in my hand, I fall in love of it. So I've decided to build a group of people to help this beautiful project. It was the start of OLPC France... 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? There is 200 children in Madagascar which use each week XO from OLPC France. I must help them do the best with this tool and give them all possible opportunities. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? OLPC never listen small deployments. It's complex just to buy laptops to them ! SugarLabs guys are sometimes too technical and not enough marketing: never even consider releasing a version 1.0 of Sugar in 5 years ! The XS is too complex to deploy and to use for non technical guys. 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar project(s) could do better? Everything will be easier if OLPC consider to allow selling XO laptops in any quantity. OLPC should also have guys dedicated to exchange between deployments: every deployment had to reinvent the wheel. An easier XS (in a good way with XS CE) would be nice. Lower the barrier to entry for new technician interested to contribute to SugarLabs. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] different perspectives
On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 07:50:52PM -0800, Sameer Verma wrote: 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? Jim Gettys. An inspirational technical leader, who asked the open source and Linux community for volunteers, in about May 2006. At the time, I was comfortably employed and needed something to do with my spare time, and this looked like an interesting challenge, for a good cause. 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? I'm paid, the work is varied and interesting, and it is still a good cause. 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? Not hearing from deployments; no closed loop feedback. Not hearing from children; no closed loop feedback. Not knowing enough of the software stack and the Fedora development process. Having to solve technical problems in eternity rather than only for the next release. The merely good solution is too often the enemy of the perfect solution. 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar project(s) could do better? Look for or sponsor research into the literacy effects of touchscreen vs keyboard user interfaces, and get the results into education systems. -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
