The release early, release often!)

My personal views on annual goals for Sugar Labs: Rather than having overarching goals set from the top-down that everyone in Sugar Labs runs towards for 2010, I'd like to see individuals within the community state and document their own individual goals for 2010, so we can easily find areas of intersection-of-interest that would advance the mission of Sugar Labs. If enough individuals pick up on the same goal and then pool together to accomplish it, then it becomes a de facto "community goal" - but one formed organically from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down.

In that vein, here's my current thinking on what my own goals within Sugar Labs for 2010 might be. This implies stuff that I am willing to take responsibility for - I plan on being involved in driving each of these goals forward.

1. An average contributor should be able to participate in SL on a minimum of 4 hours a week - that's 1 hour for a team meeting, 1 hour keeping up with lists, and 2 (or more) hours actually doing stuff. (Prerequisite: having weekly team meetings, having all conversations for a team logged to its mailing list, etc.)

This goal could probably have a better final wording, but my intent is to make it so that when you decide to join the Sugar Labs community, you can quickly (without needing to spend weeks soaking up a lot of context that us old hands tend to take for granted) settle into the rhythm of a smaller group you can quickly get to personally know, that will mentor/coach/support you.

I'm currently stepping towards this goal via my work on a small local SoaS deployment (we're waiting for the final administrative approval needed to announce it and make all our notes so far transparent - hopefully that will happen tonight; lack of transparency is totally driving me nuts, so it'll be a relief for this to get resolved). We're trying to keep the time commitment low for everyone involved, while still maintaining strong links between everybody in the project - it's a small sandbox within which we can experiment with collaboration. This is only a start, but it's a start.

2. A regularly occurring, annual (to begin with) and planned far (more than 6 months) in advance, Sugar Camp. We need a rhythm for our community to settle into, and since we have a much larger percentage of non-technical contributors than many open source projects do, we need to set our heartbeat around something broader than our software release cycle. More on this later.

3. Listen. Too often I sprint hard on Getting Stuff Done and shouting out as much of what I'm doing as I go along - which is all wonderful, but has a missing part that I sometimes forget. Listening. Finding out what other people are doing, echoing/reflecting/summarizing it back to make sure that I understand, and then - if there's a chance to do so - finding those small opportunities for synergy between my work and theirs. I need to take more time to find out and keep up with what others are doing, ask them what they'd like, what sort of help they need.

This is actually something that's motivating my second goal of having Sugar Camp - what I want from such an event is a way for all of us - at some point in the future that we can all aim for and schedule in - to come together and take a breath all at once and share and reflect on what we've been up to.

Those are my thoughts, more or less braindumped at the moment (though I've been mulling these in my head for a few weeks before forming them into written English sentences). What are yours?