From Sugar Labs

Sean Daly (sdaly at sugarlabs.org) is Marketing Team Coordinator and welcomes ideas and comments.

My Flickr photostream about Sugar can be found here.

I am running for the Sugar Labs Oversight Board, with the following platform:

• Make Sugar very widely known amongst teachers. I believe that teacher buy-in is vital to the success of Sugar. Geeky teachers will likely be the initial group to get started with Sugar, but I believe Sugar Labs needs to be considered a serious alternative to any ICT in K-8 education plan. This is only possible if Sugar becomes well-known.

• Formalize our fundraising activities. I feel Sugar Labs can inevitably obtain major funding (>$1 million USD) if a plan involving canvassing, presentations and followup can be organized. Although this will likely require new volunteers, I am confident they can be found; I intend to grow the marketing team to dozens of active members.

• Build an ecosystem for local systems providers to schools. Although geeky teachers will be able to evaluate Sugar, a deployment of any size will require support. If local for-hire IT support can rapidly obtain all the elements necessary to deploy Sugar, schools will take the risk and the rate of failed projects will be kept to a minimum.

• Support OLPC. Although Sugar has more universal ambitions than OLPC, we must not forget our Learners using Sugar today, some of whom will become the Sugar contributors of tomorrow.

• Establish consistent feedback, both from OLPC and Sugar-only deployments. Feedback is absolutely vital to providing the best learning experience through Sugar.

• Evaluate partnerships carefully. As we grow, we will face key decisions involving potential partners. Some of these decisions may be divisive to the community. As an Oversight Board member, I will try to choose what is best for the long-term growth and viability of Sugar.