[Grassroots-l] Weekend food for thought.

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Hi all,

one of the questions I spent a lot of time asking myself in the past few 
weeks is how we - as grassroots organizations and user groups - can up 
our efforts to directly contribute more to olpc.

In my humble opinion a lot of time is spent discussing recent 
developments in OLPC-land, pondering ideas, setting up infrastructure, 
talking about organizational forms, etc. and at the end of the day too 
little actual work gets done. On a personal level I feel (and I get 
caught up in this myself) that we're often spreading ourselves too 
thinly and easily get distracted by the million interesting things that 
are going on in the greater context of olpc.

For these reasons I found one of Greg DeKoenigsberg's (Senior Community 
Architect at Red Hat) latest blog entries 
(http://gregdek.livejournal.com/30505.html?view=204585#t204585) so 
interesting as he describes some of the challenges that the Fedora 
project is facing these days when it comes to community engagement:

POINT #1: ALL THE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORLD FAILS IF IT CAN NOT BE HARNESSED.
POINT #2: WE STILL DO NOT HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF FEDORA WORK ITEMS 
SUITABLE FOR NEWBIES
POINT #3: ONCE WE HAVE STRONG TASK MANAGEMENT TOOLS, WE CAN FUNNEL ALL 
KINDS OF NEW ENERGY INTO OUR PROCESS.

I think all of these points are also very valid for OLPC (and probably a 
lot of other FOSS projects) and we should try to tackle them over the 
coming weeks and months.

With regards to giving people something to work on I'd suggest pointing 
everyone to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_projects which is by no means 
complete but does give somewhat of a nice overview of smaller (and 
larger) projects that people could work on.

There's also been talk about setting up some kind of mentor program with 
some folks from maybe both OLPC and the larger community which would run 
outside the regular internship and Google Summer of Code programs. I for 
one would be happy to support someone who's interested in documentation 
(user-manuals, dev-documentation, ...).

Another thing that I've been also thinking about - but don't know how 
feasible it really is - is setting up mini-competitions (think 
"Challenge XO" or something) to get more community members involved in 
creating content, writing activities, documentation, testing, etc.

Ideas, rants, comments, suggestions?! :-)

Enjoy your Sundays,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
Co-Editor
OLPCnews, http://www.olpcnews.com