[sugar] New developers... how to place them?

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:

>   * We desperately need (documented) sample code for:
>         o Hippo, particularly for activities, particularly more
>           advanced layouts showing both how and *why*
>         o Telepathy, we need sample code for "how to share activity
>           state among multiple participants"
>         o Hardware access from Python (for all special hardware)

Yes, yes, and yes to the sample code.  Yes.  Yesssssssss, precious.

> There are thousands of developers willing to work, where do we need them 
> tomorrow.

There are gobs of PyGTK applications that could be usefully ported.  I 
don't think we necessarily care *which* ones get ported -- the overhead of 
managing that process could be... um... onerous.

That said, we *desperately* need a way to coordinate what work *is* being 
done.  The biggest problem I see is that there's no clear, *simple* way to 
know if your work is being duplicated.  I was stumbling my way through a 
port of Kye only to discover that by the time I'd figured out what I 
needed to do, someone else had already done it.

Let me ask you all to do something: go to the OLPC wiki and search for 
"activities".  Go on, go on.  I'll wait.

(Hmm, hmmm hmmm, da dum da deee....)

OK, what did you find?  You found the HIG.  Which is ok, I guess -- but 
IMHO, the *first* thing you should find... is *activities*!  But instead 
you get the HIG, a very long page about how to make activities "just so". 
Except that in reality, the way you learn how to make activities is by 
dissecting other people's activities.  Right?  A page like the current 
Activities/HIG page is good as a reference, but not as a starting point.

So in that spirit, may I propose...

THE ACTIVITY CLEARINGHOUSE.

It's a wiki page.  That's all.  Nothing fancy.  An entry looks something 
like this:

* Chess
   + Contact:	gdk at redhat.com
   + URL:	http://people.redhat.com/gdk/OLPC/chess.xo
   + Desc:	I'm working on porting GnuChess and PyChess to an
 		XO activity.  Still early on, but comments welcome.

And once we have this simple page, we drive *everybody* to it.  "Wanna 
help!  Sure!  Go find something you think would be neat to see on the XO, 
and then claim it at The Activity Clearinghouse."  Refer to the URL on 
mailing lists.  Put the URL on the front page of the wiki.  Get the URL 
tattooed on your upper lip.

We could probably come up with somethign *much* more complicated and 
"robust", of course.  And at some point, we'll need to.  But I think we 
need to start somewhere, and soon.

--g

(And maybe this page already exists -- but if it does, I certainly haven't 
found it.)

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