XS Community Edition/Getting Involved
The School Server Community Edition is a community-based project developed and supported by volunteers from around the world.
Our heartbeat is our weekly call at 2PM NYC Time, Thursdays. At the call we review decisions made the previous week and make plans for the next week. Please see the Agenda for a history of past topics or to add a topic for a future week. Please email Adam Holt (holt @ laptop.org) so we can coordinate the logistics necessary to add you to the call.
Our cadence is our quarterly sprint. Every three months we meet for a week long face-to-face work session. At these sprints we work like crazy to get our features complete so they are ready to make the feature freeze which happen just after a sprint. All are welcome in our community, however, if you are the sort that likes to stand on a soapbox and preach... you might be asked to step outside :)
If you can not make a call or sprint, please send us your questions or concerns via fax :) Seriously, in addition to the old-fashioned channels, we made use of typical open community tools.
Join our IRC live chat immediately directly on the web by entering our channel #schoolserver -- or, if you prefer, any IRC chat software can be connected to irc.freenode.net to join that same channel.
Our mailing list is at server-devel. Teachers and new contributors especially, are strongly encouraged to ask questions! Please also join the Pathagar mailing list if you're interested in digital libraries within the many schools and communities worldwide (1) lacking broadband (2) unable to afford pay-per-view ebooks (3) wary of advertising/manipulation of our youngest citizens.
Lets tone down the rhetoric.
Deployment/learning realities are inherently political (how do we nurture teachers/kids/parents, in the face of often monopolistic power from government/corporations/unions/religions, each trying to help) and as such please consider our 35+ person "xsce-devel" Google Group, where all active contributors are invited to join by sending a short paragraph about your experience and XSCE ambitions (holt @ laptop.org). Humanitarian/implementation conversations on civic deployment realities are sorely needed at every level, but the history of OLPC has shown that schools are inherently political places, not always best served by the very "male" traditions of open source mailing lists. In short, educators are too busy for another flame war. As such we seek a more friendly balance, by including more educators' and female voices, thanks to the organic interplay between public and private community spaces.
Our bug tracker is at https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce.
Our technical and user documentation, while crucially evolving at an early stage, can and should be critiqued and refined by all.