Marketing Team/Events/Sugarcamp Boston 2008/Feedback

Please add your thoughts inline on this page, and discuss on the Talk:Sugarcamp/Feedback page if you need to reach consensus on how to phrase a certain point. Thanks! Mchua 06:44, 23 November 2008 (UTC) (Original reflections are a collaboration by Bernie Innocenti, Walter Bender, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Ben Schwartz, David Farning, Chris Ball, and Mel Chua.)

Awesome

• It happened!
• Lots of people came.
• We met some extraordinary people.
• We have some new partners now.
• We had really nice meeting rooms.
• The TurtleArt portfolio demo was cool!
• The Infrastructure team got "unstuck."
• Bringing people together created a lot of energy.
• We actually can do this [run Sugarcamp]!
• What we have now [in Sugar as a product] is better than what we admit.
• We met existing volunteers.
• We met new volunteers.
• We got to hear very different points of view.
• This week was inspiring!
• We had fun people like Bernie and Yama.
• We stepped forward on technical problems.
• We met [Sugar] deployers like Caroline and Brendan.
• We increased clarity about OLPC funding.
• We got to spend time with colleagues.
• We have a better definition of OLPC vs Sugar Labs responsibilities.
• We got to resolve some issues in person [that we weren't able to resolve online].
• We got a better picture of our social interactions.
• Some people developed a lot as leaders this week, like Bernie stepping up to run Sugarcamp.
• We got to see our own dysfunctional habits.
• Ryan's speech about Sugar Labs solving a very hard problem that is "the future of computing" was inspiring.
• Gregdek standing up and trying to get us all to work together was awesome.
• The OLPC/Sugar Labs umbilical cord was cut.

Interesting

• 15 hour days, 6 days in a row... cause people to break down
• We need better organizers than me next time. (said by Bernie)
• One week passes by very quickly!
• Our sessions were conducted in a hybrid format between roundtables and conferences.
• Our schedule was very dynamic.
• There was a mix between OLPC and Sugar Labs discussions.
• Walter was coding instead of listening during some sessions! (kidding)
• This is actually the second Sugarcamp - the first was in Italy about 6 months ago.
• We did not do much hacking.
• Everyone was optimizing their own time during the conference; sometimes this meant not listening to the speaker [and working on their laptop or having side conversations instead].
• "Useful for kids" is our equivalent of "Because I Said So." We say it when we don't want people to argue with us any more.
• We focus when we make something together, like when we took notes together on the whiteboard.
• Dfarning was a good cop.
• If we fix the problem of long-distance collaborators participating in Sugarcamp, we'll also fix the problem of quiet people not talking.

Frustrating

• Too many unfocused interruptions.
• The schedule slipped due to untimed talks.
• People escaped points of disagreements.
• The pizza was unreliable.
• Action items didn't come out of technical BS (brainstorms).
• The OLPC roadmap session was frustrating because it didn't leverage the Sugar Labs community.
• Few people were able to contribute.
• The schedule changed a lot.
• At the beginning of the week, there were some difficulties between people.
• There was disrespect between some people.
• Infinite arguments.
• Some people still think there are "sides."
• Premature optimization.
• "Smartest kid in the room" syndrome (a.k.a. Apollo Syndrome)
• Quiet people didn't talk because we didn't ask them what they thought.
• Long distance collaborators had a hard time on the phone.

• Seconded. As a remote participant, I found it was hard to get attention during sometimes heated conversation. It was hard to stay focussed. It was hard to know what was happening and when (schedule changes etc). --Morgs 14:43, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

• The relationship between OLPC and Sugar Labs remains unresolved.
• We didn't go into details on why we get frustrated with each other.
• Good ideas got interrupted by other good ideas.
• Organizing this talk caused a lot of conflict within/with OLPC.

Possiblities

• Create ongoing conference committee, and assign specific duties well before events (Conf. chair, venue, food, program, speakers, sponsors, A/V, moderators, funding,...)
• Ask for use of World Bank teleconferencing network (80 locations around the world) [I have some experience with this--Mokurai 03:57, 24 November 2008 (UTC)]
• Bigger conference with more people and multiple sessions divided into tracks (some selection from topics like Constructionism, Activities, Glucose, Health, Textbooks, Content, Localization, Translation, Outreach...)
• Bring in teachers, researchers from education schools, subject matter experts, children!,...
• Field trips to schools using XOs