How will we avoid a simple repetition of the previous problem?
What makes this effort different? Nothing, so far. We once again have a bright team of developers who are at the end of the day motivated by a contract, not by a personal itch in education administration. But this is only the story so far. The next step will be to hire an additional team to collaborate with Steve’s. It may seems strange to hire a separate team rather than bolster the core one, but there’s method in my madness. Right now, a lot of the critical thinking and discussion happens inside an office in Vilnius, with no reference to the rest of the world. That makes it efficient, but not necessarily effective, since it may be efficiently going down the wrong road. Steve’s been pretty good about going to the list to get a sense of how different educational communities work whenever they start work on a new section of the project, for which I’m grateful. But the problem still remains - a lot of SchoolTool development happens in a non-transparent manner. By hiring a second team to collaborate on the core infrastructure I hope to force these discussions to happen online - in the mailing list and in wikis etc - in a way that makes them transparent and accountable. That way outsiders will be able to comment, and more importantly, we will be able to go back and understand what was decided, and why.
