OLPC talk:Volunteer Infrastructure Group

Your ideas

IRC gateway for the Big Bosses

It might be nice to provide a web irc gateway for the big bosses in case they need to ping people who typically hang out there. There could even be a channel on oftc somewhere where knowledgeable people could hang out to answer VIP questions. Just an idea Seth 19:40, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Forge a software development community

Original discussion

This wiki should be replaced. Groups of pages need to be owned by individual people. Only they can write to them. If you wish to contribute, you should email them patches. If you wish to create your own pages, you should fill out a form, and email it to the wiki administrator. What? You what? You think this profoundly misguided? Disastrous? Sure to stop wiki development dead in its tracks? Certain to dissipate and prevent formation of a wiki development community? Well, yes. Of course. That's exactly what it's done for the activity development community.

No gforge, gitorious, github, or launchpad for OLPC. Little FOSS cell phone projects have better software development community infrastructure than OLPC has managed. That a community might collectively work together to develop activities, rather than each being created in isolation, has repeatedly seemed alien to OLPC core. Let alone community or infrastructure being a project roadmap objective. The open-source project with, hands down, the greatest potential to attract developers of any, has managed to almost entirely avoid doing so. And sometimes appears oddly puzzled and confused as to how. MitchellNCharity 05:26, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

What you say doesn't preclude a wiki, as you well know. It's clear that organization of Activity teams needs to be much improved to encourage development. It doesn't help that we break the api every few months :S. Christoph's Activity Handbook is a good step in the right direction, but not nearly enough.

The openmoko community is surviving in the face of multiple competing frameworks (and crippled hardware). I suspect api changes merely serve as rot, revealing there is no one around doing maintenance. MitchellNCharity 03:42, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

What would you specifically like to see? What do you think works best to organize activity development? I would love to see the VIG implement it. Send this to the mailing list, you have good points. Seth 00:42, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Create a gforge. For years, it's been on the list of obvious things to do when creating a community software project, right next to create a wiki and mailing lists. Yes, it's PHP, and a headache. But lots of folks manage. Then perhaps consider some more modern, experimental tech, after OLPC has thus been unbroken.

Why doesn't OLPC have one? Someone tried for a day or so to set one up, got frustrated, and wandered off. Declared OLPC would never ever have an <explicative> gforge. Which is what passes for OLPC project management, with respect to community software development. All milestones can be met without interesting anyone in developing any activities. It's just never been a mission objective. Lack of a forge isn't an isolated failure. Emulation, documentation, all the building blocks of a community have been off-the-books, half-hearted efforts. So big picture, I'd like to see some project management for whatever fragment of OLPC wouldn't be entirely satisfied with all XO's going out XP or bare sugar.

Consider garage.maemo.org and projects.openmoko.org, forges for some Nokia tablets, and a non-working cell phone. Both projects are similar to OLPC - customizing linux, and developing applications, for specific and odd hardware. They have faced many of the same issues. But they have developers. They have, in general, done a much better job of creating community infrastructure and community. Despite the potentially much greater appeal of OLPC. Or perhaps because of it. They knew attracting community would make or break them, and prioritized it. OLPC has had dreams of "there will be a big bang, we'll suddenly have millions of orders, and everything will take care of itself". Didn't happen, isn't going to, and OLPC hasn't adapted.

Note that wandering maemo.org and openmoko.org can be a source of other ideas as well. MitchellNCharity 03:42, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I-g documentation discussion

Currently most sysadmin documentation is on OLPC internal wiki, which is generally only open to NDA'ed employees and select contractors.

Here are some proposals on how to publish and protect i-g documentation.

1. Put docs, passwords and other information onto a protected area of teamwiki.
2. Put the information onto public wiki, and use encryption such as gpg to encipher sensitive data such as passwords.
3. Use git, and rely on git access controls for protection. Possibly transclude git to wiki.
4. Put data into a text file on the root directory of a machine.

Please edit and add arguments pro and con.

Hhardy 17:41, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

See Michael's proposed infrastructure-documentation-system requirements and comments on that Talk page

Adric's draft RT_Strategies doc

User:Adricnet/RT_Strategies