Archive/Current Events/2011-02-04

Sugar Digest
1. I have been struggling with my end-of-the-year summary; I have always been more interested in looking forward than looking backward. Nonetheless:

The numbers tell some of the story of 2010: we have almost 2 million users, including 100% of the children of Uruguay; we had almost 5 million downloads from our Activity portal; we released Sugar versions 0.88 and 0.90. The most telling number is 12, the age of our youngest contributor.

As Sugar matures, we are entering a new phase, where more of the activity is in the hands of our user community. While we debated how best to get teachers engaged, the teachers themselves have started reaching out to each other and to us. While we debated how best to mesh our development cycle with the needs of OLPC and the distros, the deployments put together their own builds, meeting their own needs.

As with any project, we have had some churn. Tomeu Vizoso and Sebastian Dziallas have moved on to other projects; others are increasing their engagement: Marco Pesenti Gritti is back. Simon Schampijer and Sascha Silbe are taking over responsibility for Glucose; Peter Robinson is the new Sugar-on-a-Stick lead; Tom Gilliard is advancing our efforts around virtual machine support. We have a renewed engagement with the OLPC association in Miami, a group dedicated to the original vision of the project. Activity Central and Seeta are among the commercial enterprises offering Sugar support. We have some prolific new activity developers, notably ChristoferR and Mulawa. I would be remiss in not mentioning the on-going contributions of Aleksey Lim, who is touching every corner of the project. The Sur community has increased its activity and presence in the global community. We have a board member from the South, weekly debates on pedagogy in Spanish, led by Claudia Urrea, keeping us focused on our mission. Meanwhile, Gary Martin has taken on the bulk of the design burden. We'd be no where without the time spent by Daniel Drake and Bernie Innocenti efforts at deployments. And Bernie and Dogi keep our infrastructure running. Of course, there are literally 1000s of others contributing to Sugar development and Sugar deployments. Your efforts are making a difference.

Other 2010 events of note:

The first Sugar twins: The Sugar community just got larger: Pablo Flores and Micaela Acosta had twins, Nacieron Facundo and Sasha, born on 27 December.

The first Sugar couple: Sebastian Silva and Laura Vargas met as volunteers and were married this fall.

I'll do the "leadership thing" and blog about ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s why we’re going to do it.’ some time in January. Meanwhile, thank you for the great effort and great accomplishments of 2010.

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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