User:Morgs/Activities survey/Recommendations

Recommendations

OLPC

• Increase priority of communication with the activity developer community. (I'll continue involvement in this.)
• Better API documentation (in progress with Sugar almanac but could do with more resources)
• Public commitment to an API stability strategy to set expectations
• Revamp of pages about participating, including more Sugar information or links to Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs

• Add better documentation on sugarlabs.org for new participants - how to get involved.
• Move documentation over from wiki.laptop.org only in a structured way. It will take a long time at the current rate to complete this, so wiki.laptop.org is still the place activity authors will expect to find documentation.

Mailing Lists

• Use the devel-announce@lists.sugarlabs.org list for a low-traffic notification list that activity authors are recommended to subscribe to, and which will get notification of issues including:

• API breaks
• New API
• Announcements of release candidates and stable releases of OLPC images, and a limited number of testing builds prior to release to get
• Infrastructure changes such as updated testing infrastructure like buildbot or tinderbox
• New processes, or process changes, relating to:

• Activity publishing

• Encourage activity authors to use the sugar list to discuss activity development issues, or the Sugar platform, or release announcements.

• Encourage activity authors to use the devel@lists.laptop.org list to discuss OLPC hardware specific issues.

Communication

Many simple issues were raised in responses which I can address with those who raised them, or on the relevant mailing lists.

Recognition of the activity development community by communication which is targeted at them will help to keep maintainers' enthusiasm and participation levels raised.

In many cases it is up to individuals to make things happen and not wait for things to happen.

morgs 15:35, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Further thoughts

• Some activities have already been orphaned or the original author would prefer that someone else takes over the lead on developing, maintaining, testing and releasing. We need a way for people to offer their activities up for others to take over. I'll work on taking this forward.

• We also need some momentum in activity authors contributing to each others' activities.

morgs 15:11, 1 September 2008 (UTC)