[OLPC_Boston] Support team status ping, 3/24

[Mel Chua]

Owen, how about this?

We need a better way of keeping people in the loop, a place where people 
can pick up tasks when they have time but no problems to work on and 
file "this work needs to be done" tickets when they have problems but no 
time (or expertise). Project management software seems to be the trick.

After experimenting with a bunch of open-source options, redmine looks 
best - it's also what the Nepal deployment uses and they have been quite 
happy. There's interest from other projects and deployments in using 
this to keep track of their work, and it would be a great service to 
offer to all the OLPCorps groups going out this summer.

I can show you how to set it up and do some basic stuff, but don't have 
the time to tweak it extensively, get it going on Real Infrastructure 
(SL or OLPC hosting - working with their sysadmins to get the precedent 
for those privs down) or to write instructions for how other deployments 
can do the same, or to help them do it. Interested? Would make a good 
skill to share and teach, nobody has it now afaik... and it's easily 
handed off or scaled back if needed when you go to Africa. Would make 
life *so* much easier for the CFS (and other Boston) deployment(s) too.

If this sounds non-spectacular, you can (and should anyway) visit each 
of the support teams and learn their art*, but it probably would be more 
of a "teach the MIT team" exercise than a real "help with existing local 
deployment" thing, but that's okay.

*alongside them, in many cases. For the most part, everyone here is new 
to this, so you'd only be a few months behind in nearly all cases.

--Mel

PS: Yes, Elsa, I'm a slacker. ;)

PPS: BU/BC teams, what's up? Where do you guys want to jump in?

Owen Derby wrote:
> Certainly keep me in the loop. Having no experience with the XS, I'm not
> sure how much help I'll be, but I'm eager to learn and help as best I
> can. I don't think I'm quite ready to hold a dev sprint or anything like
> that quite yet. But working on an existing project, getting my hands
> dirty while learning from others would be great. Let me know.