Archive/Current Events/2010-01-19

Sugar Digest
1. Aleksey Lim has started a discussion about how to better coordinate—in a more welcoming and friendly manner—our various development activities with the needs of deployments. This complements Luke Faraone's thread from a few weeks ago about a redesign of the website, based in part from feedback from the Babson team's study of Sugar Labs. The gist of the various conversations is that we need to tackle a typical Free-Software project issue: how can we make the project more friendly and accessible to non-technical people; and, related, manage the explosion of pages, sites, points of view on the project without limiting expression on the part of individual contributors. Part of the answer certainly lies in providing a bit more structure to our website. Part of the answer likely lies in more outreach to where the non-techies hang out. (I had put together a survey last year for the teachers in Uruguay to solicit feedback on this topic, but alas, it was never conducted.) I am not sure we know what are the best channels for reaching teachers, parents, etc. In any case, it is an important issue for us. Please contribute to the discussion.

In the community
2. Bruno Coudoin announced the release of GCompris Version 9.0. Aleksey is already working on making sure that it is properly packaged for Sugar and available on our Sugar Activity download site.

3. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Jim Simmons has been working on a beginner's guide to creating Sugar Activities. He has made great progress and is at the point where some constructive criticize would be helpful (Please see [http://en.flossmanuals.net/ActivitiesGuideSugar/Introduction Sugar Activities Guide).

Help wanted
4. David Farning has been working on an Ubuntu-Sugar remix. He is looking for help with testing. The release can be downloaded from http://people.sugarlabs.org/dfarning/.

Tech talk
5. Aleksey has been busy working on Sugar Services—a decentralized means of supporting Sugar Activity dependencies. He announced that the first version is ready to test or use in simple cases. Please refer to the wiki for more details about Sugar Services (known issues, what Sugar Services is, what Sugar Services is not).

6. Simon Schampijer has resurfaced the discussion about Resume vs Start new activity instance from the Home View. Please contribute your thoughts and observations from the field.

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