wiki:SustainabilityReport

Sustainability Report

Overview/Definition? of 'sustainability'

Outline the possible sustainability scenarios and what sustainability means in the context of our development. Sustainability should be contrasted to commercial development of applications as well. Are there similar issues?

What is Sustainability?

Initial decisions that impacted the development

  • Choice of language, Python, Java, C++ - impact on the pool of local developers with the skills
  • Collaborative tools available at project start

What the $$ paid for/outputs

  • What did the Govt get for its money?
    • global recognition for work done
    • seen to actively promote open source software and software development
    • acknowledgment for work done by a global technology and elearning community
    • relationships with local and international learning communities
    • kudos for building a tool that bridged a gap namely a usable off line web content editor
    • increased knowledge capacity of the staff involved in the development
  • A usable tool being deployed throughout the world, whose application has expanded outside the original target audience, thereby allowing expanded testing and feedback, leading to further refinement, and resulting in a more durable, stable, and robust tool for everybody, including that original target audience.

What We've Done Well

  • attracted a large user base
  • made it easy to create base packages in standard formats
  • expanded educational resource packaging options from specialists to tutors
  • attracted translators for the projects interface
  • reused a number of Open Source projects to solve problem in our domain
  • demonstrated that two geographically separated teams can function effectively, based on an infrastructure of Open Source development and communications tools
  • Open Source project infrastructure makes it easier to sustain after exelearning.org is no longer active by migrating the project parts to Launchpad, SourceForge, and/or Eduforge

How We Have Failed

  • by the very nature of eXe, as an easy-to-use authoring tool requiring little or not knowledge of the intricacies of content publishing, the vast majority of eXe users are not technologically savvy, or at least not development oriented, and are therefore unable to customise or contribute code to the project.
  • even those few developers who might be interested in customising eXe, the eXe software architecture can appear rather daunting (without much in the way of documentation, especially for older, outdated, versions of some support modules)
  • organizations using eXe are not contributing anything (code, iDevices, styles) back to the project. Even those which are making customisations are keeping such customisations internally, either due to their specific nature, or a general lack of comfort in contributing.
  • user community is large, but is not skilled at bug reporting
  • user community is diverse, with a wide range of deployment targets
  • architecture has required a lot of work developing and maintaining editing infrastructure, rather than on pedagogical templating
  • attracted only one Open Source developer
  • former paid developers are interested in the project, but not contributors
  • not easy to share custom iDevices (or styles?)

The Future

Reference source materials