[TOS] POSSE Worcester curriculum

[Mel Chua]

> I only briefly looked at the logs, and I think it is too ambitious to
> expect people to code, merge, document, and package, in two/three
> days, as well as have time to discuss, reflect, enjoy meals together,
> and actually build community within the group.

Oh - they won't be doing all those things at all. The intent is to 
"begin with the finishing touches," and we're actually doing this to try 
and *minimize* the amount of work attendees have to do 
(ambitiousness-reduction, if you will).

There are certain criteria a Sugar Activity must meet to be included in 
SoaS (draft at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/SoaS_Activity_Criteria, 
finalized after the coming release in mid-May) and a number of 
Activities that *almost* meet them. We'll be taking simple Activities 
with active maintainers that don't yet meet the criteria, trying to get 
them as close to complete as possible before the POSSE, and have 
attendees finish the job - either by doing things themselves, or asking 
people in the community (who'll be on standby that week) to perform 
$task-they're-good-at (packaging, for instance) for a certain Activity.

For instance, if someone takes on the IRC Activity, they might spend the 
week doing 3 things:

1. Fixing a simple bug, like http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/582, and 
push that patch upstream to the maintainer (me)
2. Asking a packager (for instance, Sebastian) to update the package in 
Fedora
3. Writing a simple smoke test on the wiki and asking a QA volunteer 
(for instance, someone from the testing team in Wellington, NZ) to run it

...and if those were the last 3 things needed to be done for the IRC 
activity to meet the SoaS inclusion criteria, then at the end of the 
week, it would be included as a new Activity in SoaS. Basically, we take 
things that are 80% of the way done and hand it to people and say "all 
right, finish this; it's missing these parts of this checklist - these 
people over here can help you check off this box if you ask, these 
people over there can help you check off this other one, and here's a 
tutorial on how to check off this third thing."

It means we have a lot of work to do in terms of finding Activities in 
an appropriate stage (and getting them there), and making sure people 
from Sugar Labs will be around to help on various kinds of tasks that 
week (and that it's clear who to ask for what kind of help). But a lot 
of this will be happening in any case for SoaS development; POSSE just 
encourages it to happen faster, and makes sure that new resources get 
tested before POSSE starts.

Does that make more sense / address your concerns? I definitely want to 
make sure we design the curriculum with a reasonable scope.

--Mel