Policy for non-responsive maintainers

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
> If you are not in a hurry to get this discussed,
> I propose wait until we finish we 0.98 (one month aprox)
> Right now, all the people we want be involved in this discussion,
> are too busy (me too).
> About the  summer young hackaton in Uruguay, I take your word.

I am sympathetic to the "too busy to bikeshed policy discussions"
agrument, with one exception, the long-abandoned activities.

>> What's important is stating clearly what a
>> > From my experience, we have two situations clearly separated,
>> > most of the orphaned activities have been orphan for a long time, in
>> > cases, years.

It is precisely the abandonware in ASLO and d.l.o/git that I would
like to get GCI students (including especially those from Uruguay)
engaged in rescuing and bringing up to a reasonably current standard
(GTK3, i18n, olpcgames>sugargames, touch?, etc.)

>> > In the real world, we are few developers.
>> > May be the involvement of more young hackers, helps.
>> > What can we do to help this kids?
>> > If you ask me, I would spent some money to organize some
>> > summer young hackaton in Uruguay to start. (I know is off topic, but
>> > is something to think about)
>> >
>> Very nice idea. If you could organize the event, I'd be interested in
>> helping with fundraising for the travel expenses.

Yes, our developers are very, very busy developing.  It is hard to ask
any more of them, but nonetheless, I want to appeal to all members of
the Sugar Community to take part in developing tasks for GCI and
mentoring them.  This is not a grand project like a GSOC, these are
meant to be tasks that would take an experienced developer a few hours
to do themselves.

I am aware that in many cases, people will feel that it would be more
efficient to wait and tackle the task themselves, but I agree with
Walter that engaging with young developers is central to the
"high-ceiling" aspect of the Sugar mission.  As Gonzalo points out, it
is also crucial to building our small contributor pool into a larger
group.  As nice as it would be to wait for a less busy time (like the
summer), the reality is tha GCI is running now and Sugar Labs should
not fail our existing young contributors by not putting our best
efforts into succeeding with our GCI application, which would
potentially give them a chance at a Grand Prize trip to the
Googleplex.  Think what that could mean to a young kid from Uruguay
for a moment.

Please read teh GCI FAQ:

http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci2012/help_page

Please take some time to record some half-baked ideas for tasks on the
Brainstorming page:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GoogleCodeIn2012/GCI2012_Brainstorming

More importantly, take some time to flesh out one or more specific
tasks from any of the general cases described on the Brainstorming
page into it's own task wiki-page linked from the main tasks page:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code-In_2012

We really need some additional ideas in the QA category.  We are
supposed to have at least 5 tasks in each of the categories as part of
our application to GCI, and we need these this week if possible as
winning organizations will be annopunced Nov 12th.

>From the application:

"Please provide a link to your tasks page. This is one of the most
important parts of your application as it lets us see what type of
work you plan to have the students work on for Google Code-in. Please
be sure to include at least 5 tasks from each of the 5 categories."

Please help us improve our GCI application by working on developing
tasks for our application.

cjl