Things I'm working on for the CFS pilot right now, deliberately kept rough and unedited. Deployment work is messy behind the scenes, and sometimes you don't have time to make stuff all professional and shiny-looking for the public eye - this sort of to-do list publishing would probably mortify a number of other organizers, but this is the sort of list I really work from

  • Get the tech teams in Boston to have interfaces that the loop team can work with and plan around, by way of nudging the loop team to have interfaces with external volunteer groups.
  • Make and maintain a tech status page up on the wiki where the questions "what's happened so far? what's happening now? how can I help with what should happen in the future?" can be answered at any point in time.
  • Support Yifan in her team's efforts to get an XS up and running and the teachers trained on how to use it.
  • Ditto Sandra for the curriculum support and integration team ("curriculum team" for short).
  • Ditto Elsa and Colin for Sugar testing sprints.
  • There must be other teams in the Boston area who want to help with things... where are they now?
  • Schedule interview sessions with the teams working on the pilot, likely late this month after the XOs are deployed. I'm determined to have a behind-the-scenes "here's how to reproduce what we did with this deployment setup" guide. My ethnographic and journalistic tendencies demand it. (Also my apparent love of pedagogic documentation.)
  • Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
  • Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
  • Stay on top of things and keep reminding people
  • Do all of the above extremely part time, largely remotely, with no actual authority, and with no income. (I consider myself to be paid in "learning stuff and doing interesting things.")

In my craze to get things done and clarified and documented (while not being crazed and actually relaxing and cooking really good food and geeking out with music) I've largely dropped offline. My IRC hours have plummeted, and I've discovered that I'm functional without them - but that I miss them. They're like hanging out with friends in the living room after a long day, which is nice since I increasingly come home to an empty apartment (and then jog in my coat until my room heats up, after which point I stay in my room as the "has habitable temperature" location of the domicile). So now I'm productive in a way, but out of touch with the rest of the community - so many things to balance.

As a side note, I constantly wonder why I'm learning about project management; a few years ago, when I was still in engineering school, I would have told you that the last thing I wanted to become was a manager - what you need is hackers who can get stuff done. Turns out that sometimes you need more than hacking to get stuff done... so now I'm adding another perspective to my toolset. It doesn't excuse you from non-meta work, though; I'm still bushwhacking wiki pages, hammering at builds, proofreading volunteering invitations.

When you can't tell people what to do, you make it really easy and appealing for them to do the stuff you want them to do. (And if it's really easy and appealing, at that point you might as well also help them do it.)