Deployment Team/Roadmap

Modified from an email from User:Dfarning:

Overview
Our goal is to make Sugar and Sugar Activities “freely and readily available to learners everywhere.”

Planning
The first phase is planning and communicating. Sugar Labs needs to increase it's development transparency, making it easier for our partners to develop with us and build on top of the Sugar platform. Marco has been doing good work on a release roadmap and establishing a release cycle.

This is not something that we necessarily get right on the first try but by working together, Sugar Labs, OLPC and our other partners will improve the process.

Packaging
The second phase is packaging. Sugar Labs needed to reduce the barrier to entry to test and use Sugar. Greg and his team have been getting Sugar prepared on Fedora. Jonas has been shouldering the load at Debian. Morgan, Luke and James have been getting Sugar ready to ship on Ubuntu. Aleksey has been working on Gentoo.


 * We have now Fedora and Ubuntu based liveCDs and liveUSBs but We still have a way to go before Sugar is available on all desktops. Our next step in the packaging phase is to work on the server side.

Partnering
The third phase is partnering. Sugar Labs needs to partner with existing open source in education projects. Some of the most successful projects are [www.skolelinux.org SkoleLinux], a Debian based project that has had good penetration in Northern Europe. In the next few months they will be join [www.linex.org LinEx], a distribution which originated in the Extremadura region of Spain. [k12linux.org K12Linux], formally know as k12LTSP, is base on the Linux Terminal Server Project. [edubuntu.org Edubuntu] is Ubuntu's education projects.


 * There are many other project that are either regionally based, distribution based, or hardware based.

The biggest advantage of partnering is our ability to leverage their existing marketing, customer support, and feedback processes.

Placing
The end goal is placing Sugar in front of students. Realistically, we are six-months away (as of October 2008) from non-OLPC turn-key deployments. In the meantime, we need to start developing a network of early adopters and technically proficient teachers to pull us forward.

Distributing
In parallel to the above steps we have begun the Local Labs project with the main objective of facilitate all the possible local deployments, by helping the initiation and setting of local communities for development and support of Sugar.