Vision proposal 2016

2016-04-20 The following is a DRAFT, that will be presented to the Sugar Labs Oversight Board at a regularly scheduled monthly meeting as a motion to approve it for the year. Your edits are welcome!

Sugar is high quality software for children to learn with, especially younger children.

Sugar itself is a framework for programs called "Sugar Activities," which encourage learning through self-discovery. Collaboration, expression, and reflection are integrated into each Activity.

Every Activity respects every user's freedom to run, study, modify and redistribute it, governed by software licenses compatible with the GNU General Public License.

Our ultimate goal is for Sugar to be accessible to every child and every teacher in every school, all around the world, and for Sugar Labs to be a facilitator for knowledge exchange across all continents, especially knowledge that relates the software freedom movement to learning.

We grow our community to include users and contributors in all countries, in all languages, and in all cultures.

We develop our software to run on every computer device, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones, and to run in situations with local networks without direct internet connections.

Sugar began in 2006 as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Today it is vigorously developed by Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven and non-profit organization.

(*Aspirational, pending us being able to offer XO-4s:* The machine we aspired to build at OLPC in 2006 is now available as the XO-4 laptop, and you can buy XO-4s from us pre-installed with the 2016 release of Sugar.)

If you contribute to Sugar and don't have the resources you need to have impact, we fund resources that accelerate our progress (laptops, travel bursaries, and more.)

We make things to think with. Join us.

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Our 2016 goals include

• successfully completing 6 GSOC projects
• fully staffing all boards, offices and committees
• making TARGET_AMOUNT releases of Sugar
• porting TARGET_AMOUNT Activities to Sugarizer, a web-based version of Sugar
• Allow running Sugar Activities outside Sugar (see email thread)
• Make "Sugar On A Stick" into "Sugar Local Lab On A Stick," so that sugar communities without active/direct internet connections can do more to self-support themselves, and eventually upload what they have back to the central repos
  • Sugarizer becomes self-translatable, and via sugar-web thus make sugar desktop self-translatable.
• Providing a step by step guide on the homepage website to setting up a 2016 vintage deployment device - one that can be purchased in quantities of 30+ for under $100 each - that covers where to buy them, how install Sugar on all of them at the time of deployment
• consolidating all active development to Github
  • Making the github org membership a 'badge of honor' similar to the old certificates
• cleaning up all sugar labs websites, starting with the wiki and issue tracker
• liberate the "Learning To Change The World" text
• offering batches of XO-4s at volumes of 20+ with 1+ school server units, so any classroom anywhere can become a Local Lab with almost "1 click" like convenience if they have $X to put down
• your goal here!