Sugar Labs/Current Events

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This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

1. Daniel Drake started a deployment-centric thread about Sugar's direction and goals and the role that Sugar Labs should be playing. Much of the discussion is a rehash of issues we have been discussing since we began Sugar Labs one-year ago: how best should we engage deployments and how best to allocate our limited resources. And while it would be easy to simply refer to the list archives, it is better to revisit the discussion because (1) we (and the Sugar deployments) are in a very different place than we were a year ago; and (2) there is some apparent confusion regarding roles and goals for the Sugar Labs community.

What has changed? (1) we have demonstrated an adherence to a set of core values that embrace freedom and openness; (2) we are to a large extend hardware and distribution agnostic; (3) we are much farther along the path towards a stable 1.0 release; (4) we have participation from a much broader community, which includes many (vocal) teachers.

What has remained the same? (1) we still have inadequate feedback from the field; (2) we have no funds to dedicate to remedying (1); (3) we have more iterations on our design to go before it reaches maturity; and (4) we have insufficient materials for teachers to help them through these immature stages of our design.

One topic raised by Daniel is the role Sugar Labs should play in the existing OLPC/Sugar deployments. These deployments represent the vast majority of Sugar users. But there is a real disconnection between these deployments and the Sugar Labs developer community. (IMHO, this disconnect is not unique to Sugar.) Daniel recommends that we send developers into the field, which sounds great, but has some practical implications as well: it takes time and money. Alas, so far I have been unsuccessful in raising money for building such bridges—my biggest personal disappointment over the past 12 months—but I plan to keep trying. I will put some of the onus on the deployments as well. While some have invited in developers from the community, others are not yet to the point where they see this as a priority. I sense a change, but it is going to take time. Perhaps if we draw more attention to efforts such as Paraguay Educa, which is very active in directly discussing issues with the broader community, then others will follow their example. I remain of the opinion that in order to scale, community engagement has to be a pull from the deployments as oppose to a push from Sugar Labs (or OLPC). Of course, we need to be responsive to the pull—I think we have a good track record in that regard. And our being more aggressive (pushy) may help as a catalyst.

In a related topic, it was questioned the degree to which we should be investing energy into small deployments, e.g., the Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot that Caroline Meeks and I had been running this summer. Should we be exclusively concentrating on the large deployments? Obviously, I am personally invested in supporting small deployments because I am of the belief that we will be able to grow our community and user base more robustly by opening Sugar up to anyone who wants to use it, regardless of the scale of their efforts. My engagement in small deployments has been primarily in order to focus on discovering the various aspects of the current workflows that impede adoption in a classroom scenario. Caroline has been focusing on those aspects of workflow specific to Sugar on a Stick. Greg Smith has been doing a great of job of documenting our trials. And as Dennis Daniels has pointed out, we need to have more tutorial-like resources available to teachers if we want more than the most patient to try it. These many small efforts will pay off in the long term and much of what we have learned this summer will impact the large deployments as well.

Another topic was in regard to the degree to which Sugar Labs should be doing OS work. We are an upstream project and we are getting more proficient at working with downstream efforts: the Fedora community (which has taken on much of the heavy lifting associated with supporting the OLPC hardware); the Debian community (thanks to the patient tutelage of Jonas Smedegaard); openSUSE, etc. At the same time, we need to take a leadership role on occasion, such as when we embraced the fledgling efforts to create a Live USB image. (While Sugar Labs has played a role in these efforts and tracks bugs related to them, the work has been done downstream.) We simply cannot afford to do the OS work ourselves and it would be counterproductive even if we had the resources to do so.

It was asserted in the discussion that Sugar Labs is not focused on the needs of teachers. It is certainly not true that Sugar Labs is uninterested in the needs of teachers—we have had numerous discussions about how to solicit their feedback. Some efforts, such as the Sur list, have been productive. And one glorious example of our success is the fact that teachers are beginning to make their own modifications to Sugar and Sugar activities. Regarding modifications to the Sugar workflow that facilitate its use in the classroom, the vector is pointing in the right direction. It will take time.

Daniel questions our commitment to simplicity. That is a matter of constance vigilance. Every project suffers from feature bloat over time. Beyond simplicity, we need to be disciplined about asking ourselves, "how does this impact learning?"

There are some circumstances where there might be an appearance of indifference—when a problem is pushed downstream. For example, in the recent discussion about making our Live USB images more robust in light of the device being removed without shutdown, it is not clear, other than trying to influence workflow, that there is much that Sugar Labs can do about this problem. However, Sugar Labs developers have been in discussions with the various distros about how they might address the problem. Sugar is part of a ecosystem and one role our community can play is to raise awareness throughout the ecosystem of the needs of teachers.

There has also been a discussion about the merits of local labs. Daniel argues that "by requiring deployments to do technical work, you're *really* challenging them (and sometimes, excluding them)." But I think this is a somewhat distorted view of what we mean by a local lab. Local labs provide a local sense of ownership. Sugar Labs "central" is the community itself, which would be responsible for setting clear goals and maintaining any necessary infrastructure needed by the project as a whole, while the regional labs would use their own means to make Sugar relevant to their local communities, including creating for-profit enterprises, which Sugar Labs central cannot do. A local lab may:

  • Adapt the technology and pedagogy to an area's culture and resources (e.g, developing activities and content specific to a region);
  • Help translate Sugar to the local language(s);
  • Support Sugar deployments in area schools;
  • Create a local community devoted to the Sugar Labs principles, making Sugar more open and sustainable;
  • Provide for communication,between the local communities and the global Sugar Labs community;
  • Develop Local content and software that can be used not only for local purposes but also for the overall community; and
  • Host, co-host or partner in the organization of conferences, workshops, talks and meetings related to the use or development of Sugar.

But it need not be doing technical work. Of course, it would be great if over time, some of the technical load is picked up in the deployments.

Thanks do Daniel for calling us out on these topics.

Help wanted

2. Chris Ball, Ben Schwartz, and Michael Stone have been working on a collaborative arithmetic quiz. It makes extensive uses Ben's "groupthink" collaboration module. They are soliciting feedback.

In the community

3. Gonzalo Odiard reported on a successful Sugar Day Argentina on the Sur list. Gonzalo also describes three new activities: Domino.xo, a game where the pieces may have different mathematical operations or concepts which need to match; Ecomundo.xo, an ecosystem in which there is grass, rabbits and foxes that are born, eat, reproduce and die; and Elements.xo, a proof-pof-concept of a Javascript activity.

Sugar Labs

4. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM). Gary has made a number of modifications to his algorithm. Please give him feedback as well.

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

03 Aug 2009 Wired: Geek DadInventing a New Paradigm: SugarLabs and the Sugar UI
23 Jul 2009 Everything USBRecycleUSB.com - Donate your Flash Drives for a Good Cause
22 Jul 2009 OLPC FranceSugar : mauvaise presse et mise au point
13 Jul 2009 Spiegel OnlineDas zuckersüße Leichtbau-Linux
07 Jul 2009 ComputerWorldUKGran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts
06 Jul 2009 Windows ForestUSBメモリなどから“OLPC”用のOSを利用できる「Sugar on a Stick」が無償公開
02 Jul 2009 Howard County LibrarySugar on a Stick
27 Jun 2009 DeutschlandfunkSüßes für die Kleinen: Sugar ist Linux speziell für Kinder (in Deutsch)
26 Jun 2009 EduTechSugar on a stick, and other delectables (praise for the lowly USB drive)
26 Jun 2009 Ars TechnicaSugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms
24 Jun 2009 BBCOLPC software to power aging PCs
24 Jun 2009 Technology Review$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
15 Jun 2009 TechSavvyKidsEpisode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
10 Jun 2009 LWN.netSugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
27 May 2009 LWN.netActivities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
27 May 2009 Business WireDailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
01 May 2009 GuysoftNokia N810 Running OLPC Sugar
29 Apr 2009 El MercurioAsí se vivió la fiesta del software libre
27 Apr 2009 ostaticSugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
25 Apr 2009 Free Software MagazineThe Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
24 Apr 2009 Ars TechnicaFirst taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
22 Apr 2009 BetanewsBeta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
27 Mar 2009 Mass High TechGoogle promotes summer open-source internships
18 Mar 2009 MetropolisA Good Argument
16 Mar 2009 Laptop MagazineSugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market WatchSugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DCLearning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomySugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

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