This venture will depend on creative, community support and the cooperative spirit of participants. Please join and contribute ideas here, on this page, and on the It's an Education Project mailing list.
Sugar Institute Vision
Fill a house with design students, education students, and computer science students all coming together to work on Sugar. Small Scale version of this is Maple Sugar .
Something with work and living space for about 20 people to come together to work together for brief periods (a couple of weeks to a couple of months).
It could be used for training deployment teams, some weeks for hackers to work together, some weeks....
It could become a place for deployments and deployers to hire Sugar developers and designers for specific tasks.
Flophouse, or Sugar Shack, would be a precursor to an Institute to see if this is something that is useful, cost effective, and manageable.
Sugar Labs would be a technical sponsor.
Give smart, passionate students, who might not be familiar with open source and community development, a chance to immerse themselves in the culture.
Provide a catalyst for small groups, loosely affiliated with Sugar Labs, to form, and work on interesting projects that might feed back upstream.
optionally: campus housing for room and board (One could get housing and a full meal plan at RIT for something like $2500-$3500 for the summer. BUT, application deadlines have passed; though, a group application exception may be possible.)