Archive/Current Events/2008-07-14

Sugar Digest
1. Milan update: Minutes of the Sugar Labs meeting are posted in the wiki (Please see Oversight Board/Meeting Minutes-2008-06-30). Topics covered in the meeting included:
 * Governance and the Software Freedom Conservancy
 * What are we (Sugar Labs) trying to accomplish?
 * Sugar distributions: what are the issues?
 * Sugar Labs look and feel: a graphic design review
 * Sugar on mobile phones: is it possible? does it make sense?
 * Sugar Labs: models of support
 * Fund-raising: how much and from whom?

One byproduct of the meeting was further refinement of the Sugar Labs governance pages in the wiki (Please see Sugar_Labs/Governance) and the accumulation of an initial membership list for Sugar Labs (Please see Sugar Labs/Members/List).

2. Intercambio de experiencias (Exchange of experiences): There is starting to be a nice exchange of classroom experiences among teachers on the olpc-sur mailing list (in Spanish). Teachers helping teachers.

3. Regional efforts: There are a number of people discussing regional programs for Sugar development and support. Such programs are in line with the Sugar Labs vision. It is extremely important to push development and support into the hands of local organizations because: (1) it scales; (2) the detailed knowledge is local; (3) it helps the local economy; (4) it sets in motion independent agencies with a common goal and yet autonomy of action, which leads to innovation. Please bring these discussions to the Education mailing list so that we can leverage each other's ideas.

4. What works? What doesn't?: Roy Zimmermann is working in collaboration with the World Bank on a USAID-funded project to analyze the role of ICT on education in developing countries (If you have examples you think should be included in his survey, please upload them to http://www.ictimpact.org).

Community jams and meetups
5. India Day: There will be an OLPC Day in India on 4 August in a venue to be determined. On the agenda is a discussion on learning by David Cavallo.

Tech Talk
6. Development release: Today (Monday, 7 July) is the date for the next development release. Simon Schampijer asks maintainers to please provide source code tarballs by the end of the day for the following modules:


 * Development Team/Release/Roadmap
 * Development Team/Release/Roadmap

And to please announce them as explained here:


 * Development Team/Release

7. SocialCalc: KS Preeti has done a thorough review of the latest release of SocialCalc. Such feedback is enormously helpful to developers. Please help us by reviewing your favorite Activities and filing detailed reports either to the wiki or the Sugar list.

8. Gears: David Van Assche continues to make progress on getting Google Gears running under Sugar.

9. Xterm: Michael Stone posted Blake Setlow's recipe for increasing the font size in an xterm window:

LANG=C xterm -fa "DejaVu LGC Sans Mono" -fs 8 +sb

10. Etoys Quickguides: Ted Kaehler reports that the PDF file containing all of the Etoys QuickGuides is now only 4MB (instead of 22MB) thanks to a suggestion by Tim Falconer (See

11. ReviewBoard: Sayamindu Dasgupta has set up an instance of ReviewBoard at http://xenguest1.laptop.org/ for exploring. A basic workflow for using ReviewBoard is available online.

12. Misc: Tomeu Vizoso reviewed and pushed out patches this week and has begun working on Journal object transfer. Marco Pesenti Gritti is taking a well-deserved vacation. Daniel Drake addressed issues associated with the Fedora 9 rebase and has some code that brings the Record activity back into a somewhat usable state.

Sugar Labs
13. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2008-June-28-July-4-som.jpg).