Marketing Team/Events/MiniCamp Paris 2009/Christoph's Notes

Here's a list of notes from the various sessions and discussions I attended here at Marketing Team/Events/MiniCamp Paris 2009.

Sessions

School Server

• XS-0.6 is looking sweet;-)
• timeframe for 0.6: July (?)
• bootable SD card to turn an (unlocked) XO into an XS
• improved ejabberd setup

GCompris

• need a maintainer for the Sugar branch (!)
• GCompris admin interface and student progress => something we need for all Sugar activities

OLPC Quebeque

• get template of 'in-school-use document'

Sugar 0.86

• information subject of change so take it with a grain of salt and await details and confirmation from the actual development team
• estimated release: end of September, to coincide with...
  • GNOME 2.28 (final release: Sept. 23)
  • Fedora 12 release (final freeze: Sept. 22, final release: Nov 3rd)
• considerations about how to include the artefacts produced by the Google Summer of Code projects (=>communicate with GSoC students and mentors)
• focus on bug fixes
  • clean up and consolidation of Trac
• switch from Matchbox to Metacity
• toolbars: redesign of default view
• experimentation with new features (mostly in terms of designs and concepts, not necessarily implemented in Sugar-core code)
  • Group view
  • reward system
  • audio subsystem
• general discussion on the question of what features are important (input from deployments and pilot sites is badly needed)

Random Discussions

• How can European grassroots initiate and run successful Sugar pilot?

• frameworks, frameworks, frameworks
• Uruguay contact (Italian students)
• improve research angle, collect related information and contacts from around the world

Organization of similar future events

General thoughts

• 2 Sugar focused days as minimum (4 days as a maximum)
• WiFi needs to be available all the time
• location should have one large room to assemble everyone, smaller seperate spaces to get work done
• food and drinks should be available (Lebanese food prefered;-)
• don't put too much strain on one person (e.g. Sean during Sugar Camp Paris 2009)
• make it possible for remote contributors to attend during the event

Pre-Event

• announce meeting date and location in due time
• find sponsorship for event
• find suitable location for meetups
• find accomodation for attending people (Urban Camping)
• announce rough agenda in due time

During Event

• introductory round at the beginning of the day (esp. when new people are present)
• announce how remote contributors can attend during the event
  • preferably organize a certain time-slot (e.g. mid-day and/or at the end of the day)
• end with what people liked and didn't like

Post-Event

• follow up on what was discussed
• make summaries of what was discussed available to the larger community