[Sur] [SLOBS] "New Co" / Nueva Empresa

[Aleksey Lim]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 02:52:15PM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 19:51:48 +0000
> > From: alsroot en sugarlabs.org
> > To: cbigenho en hotmail.com
> > CC: olpc-sur en lists.laptop.org; bkuhn en sfconservancy.org; tony en sfconservancy.org; iaep en lists.sugarlabs.org; slobs en lists.sugarlabs.org
> > Subject: Re: [SLOBS] [Sur]  "New Co" / Nueva Empresa
> > 
> > On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:54:34AM -0700, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hi...
> > >
> > > At the olpcSF meeting last October some of us met informally and discussed
> > > the need for exactly what you are suggesting: an organization that would
> > > act as an "umbrella" for groups that wanted to fund small deployments and
> > > make other contributions to the OLPC, Sugar, and open source software in
> > > education (OSSIE).
> > >
> > > As far as I know, nothing has been done to implement this idea yet. Some
> > > of the suggestions we had were:
> > >
> > > * It should be a completely separate entity from OLPC and Sugar Labs to
> > >   insure independence.
> > 
> > In fact, Sugar Labs was for me exactly such "umbrella" (pure community
> > based organization to coordinate not only Sugar development but also any
> > Sugar learning platform related work "in the field") from the beginning.
> > So, being independent from Sugar Labs sounds for me like being
> > independent from the community :).
>
> Exactly... independent of all of the politics! It would also allow
> for the inclusion of other OSSIE projects folks might want to undertake. 

(Lets keep politics aside. Though I not fully understand your concerns
regarding SL. Generally speaking, people who will get benefits from new
organization will be related to SL as well, since they are a part of
global Sugar relation community. But, I think that new organization is more
important than the fact of relation to some of existing orgs. And, I
personally think that it is absolutely not important will funded
projects be related to Sugar-desktop-environment/XO-laptops or not,
it is much more important if they are related to principals that SL's
mission is talking about.)

btw, are you thinking about organization that only provides/accumulates funds
(like administration of crowdfunding site)? Or, it should do something
more?

Because my current thinking is that such organization should provide
funds, from one side, and technical possibility to process projects in
most useful way from another side. I don't mean that new organization should
develop Sucrose, nope, just "package" it (see 4.1/4.2 in my original post).
The problems with existing implementations, how I see it, are:

* Sugar Labs takes care, "officially", only about Sucrose (thats just
  several software projects, not a full featured software stack that is
  ready to use);
* OLPC provides such stack but only for XO laptops (and ignore,
  understandably, desktops).

My point is that it not only speeds up funded projects implementation,
but also make them replaceable. If current project implementors can't do
they work any more, it will be easy (because they work was based on
already created procedures and software) to "replace" them.

> > ...
> > 
> > Did you consider joining existing crowdfunding efforts (I assume there
> > should be kickstarter like sites that are related to edu) instead of
> > creating new GNO? If it is not trivial to handle donations worldwide, it
> > might be useful to reuse already done work.
>
> All of the crowd funding sites I have checked out take quite
> a cut for their services (I guess they do have to eat).
> I was hoping that could be reduced or avoided all together
> or at least minimized.

My point was about joining existing crowdfunding effort in edu field,
i.e., the goals are the same and, most likely, we will just duplicate
existing implementation.

-- 
Aleksey