Frailty of volunteer-dependent projects

Posted Feb 2, 2012 13:15 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
Parent article: SCALE 10X: The trickiness of the education market

> The deployment was initially a success, but it did not end well when MALT relocated to a new venue on the other side of the city. The volunteers who had been supporting the lab found it impossible to make the numerous trips required to support the new facility on an ongoing basis, and the new MALT staff were uninterested in the lab.

I think that this is an inherent weakness of any project which depends on volunteers or other forms of goodwill in the longterm. As soon as that goodwill weakens for any reason (other pressures, other interests) the project is liable to collapse. On this line of thought finding ways to make educational Linux deployments self-sustaining is probably pretty crucial to their success.