User:Holt

More than an afterthought, more than usability hunches, and rather in the footsteps of Greg Smith and the 200+ support volunteers I decided to recruit starting in December 2007. Let's expand the mandate of Sugar Labs into the treacherous world of supportive support, and friendly documentation -- where Quality feeds on itself, when users and volunteers are all tired of being users -- and help each other get back to learning.
 * Embrace Support as explicit strategy

Far beyond Sugar's existing developer constituency, eg: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program We must all Renew Our Message, and focus on people who are natural "connectors" building a Community Projects Platform that invites gradual engagement and commitment -- and avoid scaring away our most loyal & resourceful grandparents unfamiliar with irc! Participatory communities need sunlight, water and modern tools; a majestic forest will come. Organized Community Mentoring within OLPC Contributors Program (which I overhauled [in 2009] thanks to a dedicated team of volunteers) has proved instrumental to this end.
 * Crack Open Volunteerism & Mentoring

Vividly illustrating how learning with Sugar might make their jobs easier, building lifelong Bricolage dreams in their kids, eg: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ClassActs/Resources I will work with the Red Hat-inspired http://teachingopensource.org initiative (join me for Toronto's Summit Oct 29-30) to match techie teachers with non-techie teachers to establish this critical social fabric. Building a movement around diverse Grassroots Innovation means learning from our failures. While I prefer the word Adoption to Deployment, XO/Sugar supporters spontaneously came together with me Sept 6-11 [2009, among others] in Washington DC (with zero funding) to prove This Can Work!
 * Build Places for Teachers: Techie and Non-Techie

REAFFIRMED MORE EXPLICITLY FOR 2010-2011: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-September/011662.html

Our business is kids but our management must be adult if scalability is to be realized. Credibility does not come overnight, and is even harder to establish in the funding battles of the non-profit world-- but the time is now...
 * Bring Budgetary Authority to Sugar Labs from OLPC, and Others

Nurtured by the expressivity of the telephone and the facetime of local groups, when digital immigrants need months to learn wiki/irc culture. Community leadership means reducing "male" conflict, and increasing "female" active listening -- greatly deepening our culture of free speech and critique. Not a testosterone culture of "free screech" scaring away earnest contributors. But a genuinely Free and Open tolerance, marching forward into globalization every day, driven by more quiet consciences than will ever send us email.
 * Build Relationships around our Human Mission

Gratuitous travel exhausts our earth's vanishing resources. But I paid for several trips around North America and Europe over the past [3] years for a reason -- to lay these seeds. Now we can move our community-building beyond cultivating hobbyists into a learning organization, willing to both negotiate large contracts and decentralize delegated empowerment, accept other learning cultures with different curricular construction kits. Washington DC is a perfect example: building Sugar/XO synergies with deployment expertise, physical XO libraries, a grassroots repair shop, monthly talks and a sophisticated network of nearby computer clubhouses. Similarly, I [worked] hard with Mike Lee to seed a multitalented Sugar/OLPC group in NY City going strong for a year now if you can hopefully join! EG. The volunteer repair centers I coordinate worldwide for OLPC can now grow into a much stronger network of networks with proper Care And Feeding.
 * Cross-fertilize Sugar/OLPC Local Labs

I will substantially widen the spectrum of communications between Sugars Labs and OLPC to help pave the way for Sustainability over the coming decade, open to all meaningful partnerships, while always protecting our organic grassroots. This will not be easy, but the lifelong friends I've made over the last [3 years] in the OLPC/Sugar community makes this possible. Kids need healthy families to explore their worlds, not tabloid divorces, to advocate for 1 billion small-but-growing brains on this planet. Sugar Labs and OLPC owe it to the world's children to similarly mature into responsible, playful, lifelong parents! Even if not always loved :)
 * Now is the time to build a Broad-Based 21st Century Learning Movement