Collogue

Some additional thoughts and clarifications about my previous post.

• There is a legitimate worry about increasing too much the scope of the deployment communities by having them manage their own releases. I think it’s a challenge for us to provide them the best possible base, both at the distribution and at the Sugar level. And good tools to compose and customize their images. In an ideal world, it should be trivial from a technical point of view.
• One of the reason I like the structure I outlined is that it creates a very clean interface between end users and the Sugar developers. Deployment communities gather feedback from the field, research about the kids needs, do testing themselves to ensure they ship an high quality product. But they are very lazy on the technical part. Most of the time they don’t do the work themselves but just make sure that their needs are properly communicated to the two of their upstreams: the community of the distribution they choose and the awesome Sugar developers, which are eager to fulfil their needs! And they have the power to select what it’s better for their local situation, to decide when a release is mature enough to ship, to set a schedule, to be responsible for the product they deliver. They are the one which should have this power because they care and because they have the closer point of view on user needs.
• I would like to see a community forming around Sugar on a stick and start helping with testing and at some point also with image builds. Caroline is coordinating with Olin students about it, I think that’s a great opportunity.
• As Michael pointed out this is pretty different from the way I’ve been conceptualizing things so far. I don’t see it as a change of direction but as a gradual adjustment. I change my mind all of the time, and I know it can be annoying, but situations and my perception of them changes constantly, it would be silly if my opinions wouldn’t follow. Still, I’m trying to fully understand the consequences.
• There is no technical reason that the deployment community role could not be handled by a Sugar Labs team. Though I think it’s our interest to do as little as possible and do it at our best. Also organizational separation would probably better represent the situation. In other words, if external groups step up to handle deployment, we should hug them, give them the full space and let them rock.