journal is hard + sugar and the digital age

[Michael Stone]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 12:09:22PM -0700, Carol Hussein Lerche wrote:
>One thing that might help is a wiki FAQ about the journal collecting a
>roadmap and pointers to the work that has taken place already in one place.

Yours is an excellent suggestion which we should strive to implement for
all of our 

   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Subsystems

Thank you for reminding me.

>But from the outside perspective what I see reading conversations
>about this on the list is a sense that there are true believers inside the
>olpc and sugar development team that hold to a belief that a great day is
>coming for the journal, but without a concrete roadmap making that belief
>real to those only experiencing the difficulty in dealing with what is there
>right now, they sometimes sound a bit delusional.  (Not saying that they
>are...it's just a big mismatch between pie-in-the-sky pictures of a cloudy
>goal and no visible stepping stones to that goal).

Different people have very different initial knowledge about what is
achievable in any given span of time and they also tend to be persuaded
by different kinds of arguments. Thus the "stepping stones" likely
appear differently solid to you than to me even though I'm pretty sure
that we're both reasonable people. Consequently, I would find your
remarks more helpful if you simply asked those 'true believers' to
better and more publicly justify their feasibility claims. (For example,
maybe Scott could be induced to make a screencast of his Journal2 demo?)

Michael

P.S. - On the same note, please recall that those of us who choose to
accept and to pursue the historical goals of Sugar have our reasons [1]
for doubting the viability of existing techniques.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html