User:Alsroot/Sugar Network brief introduction

 Hi all!

My name is Aleksey Lim, I'm a software developer who started professional career in 1999. Starting from 2008, I'm a Sugar Labs contributor and volunteer. Within the Sugar Labs, I'm developing a couple of software projects, maintaining several Sugar Activities (applications for Sugar learning environment), support several public services on Sugar Labs servers. Besides, I'm a Sugar Labs Oversight Board member.

I'm going to introduce a project I, as a part of a team, is working on. The project is named Sugar Network. This project was initially started by the Peru Sugar Local Lab to address the needs identified during the work on Puno pilot program. Such as,


 * lack of connectivity in one teacher schools in rural regions of Puno,
 * the difficulty to provide technical and educational support for these schools,
 * the lack of different types of the content and hardness to provide social activity around this content.

The team consists of Peru Sugar Local Lab members, volunteers from Puno, and global Sugar community members. With help from broad Peruvian community (translating Sugar learning environment interface into Aymara and Quechua languages) and supporting by Puno municipality, this project is intended to solve the problems, mentioned above, with the following solutions:


 * Convenient way to get access, for students and teachers in Puno schools, to various types of the content.
 * Provide such access on different levels of network connectivity, i.e., Internet connection, connection to a school network, offline mode when people have only their computers.
 * On all connectivity levels, support social activity between Sugar Network participants, when people can share their problems, ideas and opinions within the Network.
 * Use all, previously mentioned, possibilities, including functionality to collect students' behaviour statistics, support educational process in Puno schools.
 * Provide technical support to students and teachers in Puno schools.

The implementation work was started in December, 2011. The final checkpoint, to analyze Puno pilot program results, is the end of 2012 year.

This pilot program should be only the beginning to proof the concept. The real success of the Sugar Network depends on connecting many schools, not only in Puno region, with the rest of international community. Using Sugar Network server accessible via the Internet, people will visit the Web site to participate in populating the Sugar Network content and collaborate with students and teachers from schools.

For more detailed information, visit the following resources:


 * http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network The Sugar Network home page.
 * http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network/Declaration_of_purpose The definition of Sugar Network purposes.
 * http://groups.google.com/group/sugar-network/about The discussion group to track implementation progress.

-- Aleksey 