[Server-devel] Dealing with the disruptions caused by XSCE.

[David Farning]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Samuel Greenfeld <greenfeld at laptop.org> wrote:
> Unfortunately you chose a week to ask this question when many people are on
> vacation.
>
> I will give my personal, non-official response; however as it is wider
> issue, server-devel@ likely is not the list this should be discussed on.
>
> Recently there have been a number of cases where volunteers along with other
> companies/parties have either been confused for or interfered with official
> representatives of OLPC.  This is causing problems with support & sales
> where the OLPC Association is trying to send one message, and the other
> party, no matter what their intent, is sending another.
>
> As a result, the mandate has come that we need to be extra clear when
> volunteers and other parties are doing something versus someone actually
> hired or contracted by OLPC professionally.  This is why you might have
> noticed templates being added to the XSCE Wiki articles noting that it was
> not something OLPC supported or created.
>
> That being said; I welcome a discussion on how to do this.  Although it may
> be desired to move purely volunteer-run items into their own area,
> personally I do not think we should splinter hosting all over the place.
>
Samuel and Daniel,

Thanks for the clarity.

I think this is a reasonable position. It provides legitimacy for olpc
(lowercase) projects without implying support or endorsement by OLPC.
(uppercase)

David

> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 3:47 AM, David Farning <dfarning at activitycentral.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Over the past couple of days there have been some threads about XSCE
>> and OLPC-XS which raised some interesting questions.
>>
>> The primary impetus for the project was that several of the original
>> participants had struggled to deploy and adapt OLPC-XS to meet a
>> specific deployments needs. The original School Server design was
>> sound. We felt deployments struggled unnecessary with the monolithic
>> implementation. The project could improve from a more modular
>> implementation. The potential rewards or a rewrite were significant.
>>
>> However, the risks were just as significant:
>> 1. The project could fail for any of a million reasons. That would
>> mean wasted work and pilots left with an unsupported server.
>> 2. The project could alienated current stakeholders. Several people
>> and organizations had become experts at setting up and maintain XS
>> systems. A different system would have a negative impact on the value
>> of their expertise.
>> 3. The project would reduce the value of past investments in XS.
>> Several deployments had invested significant amounts of time and money
>> on their current systems. A different system would have a negative
>> impact on the value of their investment.
>>
>> As the impact on of XSCE increases, the ecosystem is adapting to these
>> changes by adapting, ignoring, or pushing back. These are all rational
>> adaptations. Building credibility is an iterative process. The
>> responsibility for building the credibility is squarely on the
>> shoulders of XSCE to _prove_ that the rewards of working with the
>> project are greater than the risks.
>>
>> This is all pretty straightforward stuff as described by Disruptive
>> Innovation theory.
>>
>> This disruption is particularly evident in the relationship between
>> XSCE and OLPC. Long term, XSCE _might_ be valuable to OLPC in their
>> role as "The world food bank of education." Short term. in their roles
>> as a sustainable business, it is a pain in the ass. What do you say to
>> a customer when they ask for features which are still in a unreleased
>> version of a community project... which just showed up on their wiki
>> one day.
>>
>> Now that XSCE exists and is a viable project, OLPC will have to make a
>> decision; take a wait and see approach, compete with it, or
>> collaborate with it.
>>
>> A first question is should the XSCE wiki remain in a username space at
>> wiki.laptop.org ? Should it move to another home? Should it move to
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XSCE ? or should we wait 3 months and
>> revisit the issue?
>>
>> --
>> David Farning
>> Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> Server-devel mailing list
>> Server-devel at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
>
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com