Sugar Labs
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Sugar Labs
The mission of Sugar Labs is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, and teach with the Sugar learning platform.
Teams
Running a team
Educational
Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community.
Education Team
The mission of the education team is to explain why Sugar is an ideal platform for learning, and to provide guidance and feedback to those who are working on how Sugar enhances learning.
Deployment Team
The mission of the Deployment Team is to voice the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community, to find ways to support those needs, to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and Sugar developers, and to build local Sugar Labs organizations worldwide.
Technical
Learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.”
Development Team
The mission of the Development team is to build and maintain the core Sugar environment. This includes specifying and implementing new features in conjunction with the Design team, fixing bugs as they are found by the Testing team and the Sugar community, and generally making Sugar awesome in all ways.
The Development Team always needs help with fixing bugs and writing cool new activities.
Design Team
The mission of the Design Team is to make Sugar beautiful, elegant, and highly functional.
The Design Team needs help reviewing the roadmap for Sugar 9.1.
BugSquad
The mission of the BugSquad is to be responsive to incoming bug reports. The Squad needs to triage the bugs and work towards a solution with the reporters and the developers until the issue is solved. Therefore it has an important role in making the end product better and can be seen as the liaison between testers/users and developers.
Documentation Team
The mission of the Documentation team is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including user manuals, programming references, and tutorials.
Community
Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise.
Marketing Team
The mission of the Marketing team is to articulate the benefits of Sugar (simplify), to promote these benefits as widely as possible (amplify), and to recruit volunteers to improve the Sugar experience.
The Marketing team needs wordsmiths to refine the Sugar message, and mavens to spread that message.
Oversight Board
The mission of the oversight board is to ensure that the Sugar Labs community has clarity of purpose and the means to collaborate in achieving its goals.
Wiki Team
The mission of the Wiki team is to maintain the Sugar Labs wiki, and to help the Sugar Labs teams and the greater educational community to collaborate effectively.
The Wiki team needs talented wiki gardeners to take loving care of overgrown wiki pages.
Infrastructure Team
Keeping the project humming along nicely, by maintaining and developing Sugar Labs' collaboration and public-facing infrastructure.
Sysop Prime Directives:
- Protect the Innocent
- Uphold the Law
- Reboot Sparingly
The Infrastructure team can always use smart sysadmins.
Calendar
Events
Sugar community events are posted in a public calendar within the Google Calendar system. The calendar is available in a variety of formats: 
.
Please contact User:Walter if you'd like to post an event to the calendar. Or simply post it below and it will be included.
Roadmap
The Sugar community roadmap is used to guide our community efforts:
- Mission, Vision, Values
- Distribution
- Deployments
- Quality Assurance
- Infrastructure
Sugar Labs: a learning and software-development community
The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs”, which is in the process of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy (a non-profit foundation to produce and distribute and support the use of free software) serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.
Education Goals
Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:
- To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere;
- To explore and share best practices
- To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning
- To provide mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results.
Technical Goals
Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on “activities” rather than “applications.” The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:
- To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.
- To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be “simple” to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.
- To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and example code that uses these APIs.
- To make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.
Community Goals
Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:
- To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support.
- To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
- To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation.
- To provide integration and customization services.
Principles
In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to the principles described here, which are the author's own translation of an original text in Spanish.
Identity
- Clear mission – Full disclosed objectives.
- Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
- Explicit connections outside – Relationships with other organizations listed.
Structure
- Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
- Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
- Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
- Activities described – All the ongoing work is acknowledged.
Operation
- Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
- Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on own skills and contributors’ support.
- Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.
Information
- Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
- Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
- Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who can access them.
Goods
- Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed. (Please see/contribute to the discussion here.)
- Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
- Public accounts – It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.
- A special thanks to our contributors.
Governance
Informed by the above principles, Sugar Labs has a governance model.
