Project guidelines
- From a security perspective : (1) file-path compliance; (2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration. (see "Bitfrost compliance) in mailing list archives
- From a style perspective : see #style below.
- From an educational perspective : see #education below.
- From user perspective : please elaborate and discuss new and old activities at the Brilliant activities page.
Some proposed criteria for inclusion:
education
- Epistemological impact—to what degree does this activity positively impact learning? (This is of course the most important criteria.)
- Fun—is it fun? engaging?
- Sharable : Is it sharable locally? Over time? Does it lead to long-term collaborations?
- Discoverable : is the core activity discoverable? (This is not to say that it shouldn't be hard work to fully exploit the power of an activity, but it should have a low barrier to entry.)
- Constructive : does it help children learn long-term skills? does it promote an attitude of violence?
style
- System quality — is the activity sufficiently robust in its implementation that it will not compromise the integrity or supportability of the system? Is the overall quality of the implementation adequate to meet our standards? Can the community be engaged in the process of testing and "certifying" and maintaining the activity?
- Sugarized—to what extent has the activity been integrated into Sugar, including UI, Journal, security, internationalization, etc.? Does the activity require the folding in of additional libraries and resources? (This has impact on robustness—positive and negative—support, bloat, and the overall usability, aesthetics, and perception of quality of the machine.)
- FOSS—is the activity and all of its dependencies free and open?
- Extensible—is the activity something the community can extend? Does it span multiple needs? (And does it have—or the potential of having—an upstream community of support?)
- Uniqueness—does the activity add a unique feature to the core?
- Expectations—does the activity meet the expectations of (children, teachers, parents, G1G1 audience, etc.)?
age rating
This tag is a cross between the target audience and an age appropriate rating system. The rating system could be similar to one of the following:
- ESRB - Entertainment Software Rating Board (United States)
- PEGI - Pan European Game Information (Europe)
- CERO - Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (Japan)
Some have suggested the following, but these ratings are not usually applied to software:
We cannot use the ESRB per se, because we cannot follow the official ratings process (there is no "final copy"), and I doubt whether developers would want to pay their fees.
The PEGI system may be a good fit, since participation is usually voluntary. However, it is not clear what their process is, or whether we can use their ratings without paying a fee.
A long and emotional mailing list thread centered around the [in]appropriateness of DOOM for many of the xo's users. The ability to link to a list of activities that fall under certain rating subsets is important.