Archive/Current Events/2009-12-10

Sugar Digest
1. We celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S. this past week. It is a time for family, food, and what we call "football" in North America. In my family, I am always tasked with making desserts: pies, cakes, tarts, and cookies. (This year, I made a pumpkin-praline pie, a pecan pie--which morphed into a pecan cobbler, a chocolate-mousse pie, a Key-Lime pie, an apple tart, a fruit tart, hermits, oatmeal cookies, and a coffee cake. I will share my recipes with anyone who is interested.)

I cannot remember a time when I wasn't cooking. It has always been an adventure because I cannot keep a recipe in my head and I cannot resist experimenting. (I should consider using a laser cutter to print the recipes on my pies.) Call it kitchen chemistry or Constructionism in the kitchen. Either way, it is authentic learning.

2. Simon Schampijer, the Sugar Release Manager, has put together a detailed set of pages in the wiki outlining our policy and process for proposing new Sugar features. "The main goal of the feature policy is to make systematic and predictable the process by which community ideas on how Sugar should evolve get transformed into actionable proposals."

Simon and I have been discussing the scope of this policy in IRC. It is appropriate and customary for the Release Manager to set policy, but I would like to see the process followed more generally, as it provides a structure that the Activity Team can also leverage as part of the on-going Sugar activity update process. Activities updates wouldn't be tied to Sucrose release cycle, but it provides a nice framework for community feedback and makes clear the roles of ideation, implementation, and packaging and maintenance.

(For more background on FOSS project development, check out Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software.)

In the community
3. Carlos Mauro defended his thesis this week. His topic was: Evaluación de la OLPC con Ingeniería de Usabilidad.

Help Wanted
4. Wade Brainerd has observed that while the download counts on activities.sugarlabs.org are very high, the review counts are very low. For example, Typing Turtle has nearly 50,000 downloads but only two reviews. You are encouraged to write reviews. We would especially like to hear from deployments.

In the community
5. I'll be giving the keynote at the World Netbook Summit in Paris next week.

Tech Talk
6. Simon has refined the Sugar 0.88 Roadmap A detailed discussion can be found here.

7. Aleksey Lim has been leading an interesting discussion on 0install to cover situations such as:
 * activities that have dependencies that are not included in the Sugar Platform;
 * building and installing activity-specific binaries; and
 * running non-Sugar applications that are not well packaged in GNU/Linux distributions.

Sugar Labs
8. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM.