Greg Smith Weekly Report Week Ending November 14

[Greg Smith]

Overview:

Work on XO Software Release 9.1.0 is underway. The release is planned 
for March, 2009. Goals, strategy, and target features should be defined 
by the first week of December. Detailed bug tracking conventions, branch 
strategy and release management tactics should be defined before the end 
of December, 2008.

Greg is collecting all well motivated feature suggestions here: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap
Please add your feature requests to this page (or e-mail them to 
greg at laptop.org).

User link of the week (Spanish): http://sextosdela37.blogspot.com/
Blog from 6th grade class in Uruguay. Built with XOs, it includes eToys 
projects, Google doc graphs, poems, slide shows, pictures and technical 
tips for optimizing XO performance!

User link of the week (English): 
http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/archives/2008/10/ethiopias-second-olpc-deployment/
Blog post about roll out of XOs in Ethiopia.

**********************
Status of progress towards last week's goals.

1 - Finish first review of January mini-conference proposals. Transition
conference work to follow up and status only. Add agenda items to weekly
Future Feature planning meeting (Wed. at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net
#olpc-meeting) to prioritize full feature roadmap and decide how we will
pick 9.1.0 target features.

GS - Done. Completed review of January conference proposals, grouped in 
to subjects and set approximate times. See: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2
Added 9.1 prioritization item to Future Feature roadmap meeting (Wed. 
11/19 at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting). The Sugar camp 
(http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp/Schedule) will happen at the same 
time and a 9.1 session is planned for Thursday with Ed. So significant 
work on prioritizing XO Software Release 9.1.0 prioritizing may have to 
wait until after that.

2 -  Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap
Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of
detail from deployments on what they need.

GS - Partially done. Met and exchanged e-mails with Uruguay, Peru and 
Ethiopia. Got confirmation of requirements definition from Peru and 
Ethiopia on their top priority: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security

I still need to formalize and order the list of all requests from each 
deployment.

3 - Start writing detailed use cases, complete ideas for using XO/XS
(probably a requirements definition for supporting "learning projects"),
and presentations for mini-conference.

GS - Mostly not done. Followed up on thread re: asynchronous 
collaboration tools on Sur list. See: 
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-November/001257.html 
Still need to write some detailed examples of XO use in class.

********************
Goals for next week:

1 - Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap
Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of
detail from deployments on what they need.

2 - Listen to ideas and plans from Sugar camp and integrate them in the 
Feature roadmap page as needed. Aside from standing and in person 
meetings, I plan to sit in on as many Sugar camp meetings as I can next 
week.

3 - Start process and operations page for 9.1 release. Come up with Trac 
conventions and other tracking systems for execution of a quality release.

4 - Update school server wiki pages and documentation. Add links to 
Readme files to 0.5 release notes. Mark older pages obsolete and try to 
make it crystal clear what the server supports now.

Thanks,

Greg S