Sugar Labs/Contacts

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Connect with Sugar Labs

Sugar has a growing community that is ready to help you. Because users and contributors span the globe, a key element to the project is communication. Mailing lists, forums, blogs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Jabber, and email provide quick and easy ways to communicate. Also, try our new, community-powered support site and tell us what you you think.

Mailing Lists

See all our mailing lists at http://lists.sugarlabs.org. After registering your email address with the mailing list, you will receive the discussion posts or digests of the posts made to the list server. Archives are available on each list's info page. They contain the full history of discussions about Sugar since the formation of Sugar Labs. This a link to the It's an Education Project archive.

See also the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) mailing lists and archives at http://lists.laptop.org.

A web-view of mailing lists in a fourm-like interface can be found at Nabble. Keep in mind that using Nabble has the following limitations: Nabble does not support posting to more than one mailing list at a time (cross-posting) and Nabble does not index all sugar lists.

General Lists

It's an Education Project - Our main mailing list for discussions of Education and Sugar. (See a graphic Self Organising Map for an overview of the past weeks' discussions on the list.)
Marketing - Where we discuss marketing and outreach for the Sugar Learning Platform and its parent organization, Sugar Labs.
School Server - A list for discussions on the XS school server (XO school Server).

Project Lists

Summer of Code - A list to support the Google Summer of Code open source development project.
Fourth Grade Math - A list supporting the development of activities for the Math4 Project.

Developer Lists

Sugar-devel - The Sugar developers' email list. (See the graphic Self Organising Map archive for an overview of past months' discussions.)
Fedora OLPC - The Fedora development project for OLPC XOs and a Sugar distribution.
devel - The OLPC developers' email list.

Sugar Labs Systems Infrastructure

Systems - A list for those supporting the Sugar Labs systems infrastructure.

Starting a new list

The best way to start a new mailing list is to begin a discussion on a current list that's related to the topic. Once the discussion becomes active, ask for a separate list for that topic.

When a critical mass of people are regularly discussing the same topic, email the following information to the IAEP list:

The name for the new mailing list, with alternative names in case the first one is taken
A description of the list, its purpose, and why it's needed (being able to say "we've been talking on this other list for a while, and the discussion has grown too big, see these archive links" is helpful)
The name/email of the list administrator, and of at least one other moderator (minimum, one admin and one moderator)
At least 10 names/email addresses of people who want to be the initial subscribers

Forums

Support Forums

http://getsatisfaction.com/sugarlabs - A new community-powered support site for Sugar Labs.

You can ask a question, share an idea, report a problem, and give praise.

forum.laptop.org - The official OLPC community support forum.

Total posts: 9344 • Total topics: 1922 • Total members: 3757 • _{26 March 2009 (EDT)}

General Discussion

OLPC News Forums - A popular forum site, but not frequented by core developers.

Total posts: 28249 • Total topics: 3344 • Total members: 3742 • _{26 March 2006 (EDT)}

Blogs

Planet OLPC and Planet Sugar Labs - These aggregate a number of popular blogs on Sugar and OLPC. Contact mailto:planetmaster@sugarlabs-nospam.org for adding more blogs to this feed.

IRC, Internet Relay Chat

Most Sugar Labs chat takes place on IRC (see Internet Relay Chat).

You can use a computer-based client to log in to IRC (such as Sugar IRC activity, Pidgin, X-Chat). This link should work for such clients, irc://irc.freenode.net#sugar.
Or, use a browser add-on (like ChatZilla for the FireFox web browser, where the above link will also work).
Easiest, might be this web browser-based service provided by qwebirc to chat on #sugar now.

IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion 'channels', but allows for personal chat and data transfer as well.

The Sugar Labs Community uses a series of channels in the irc.freenode.net network.

irc.freenode.net channels

General:
`#olpc-help or irc://irc.freenode.net#olpc-help`	Community help. If you need help using an XO or with Sugar, and you haven't asked anywhere else: try here first.
`#sugar` or `irc://irc.freenode.net#sugar`	For day-to-day Sugar development—a casual, friendly place where Sugar developers collaborate.
`#sugar-meeting` or `irc://irc.freenode.net#sugar-meeting`	A channel for scheduled Sugar Labs meetings. See the Sugar Labs event calendar.
`#fedora-olpc` or `irc://irc.freenode.net#fedora-olpc`	A channel for the Fedora development project for OLPC XOs and a Sugar distribution. See the project page.

irc.oftc.net channels

General:
`#schoolserver` or `irc://irc.oftc.net#schoolserver`	The meeting channel for the XS (XO school Server).

See also OLPC:Communication channels.

How to use IRC channels

A web-based chat for freenode.net channels is qwebirc, with nickname: (whatever you like), and channel: #sugar (or whatever other channel you're trying to get into).
A web-based chat for other channels is Mibbit, with nickname: (whatever you like), server: irc.oftc.net, and channel: #schoolserver (or whatever other channel you're trying to get into). It also includes an in-line translation service that is helpful when other languages are used. (Connections via mibbit are no longer supported on freenode. You may wish to consider using http://webchat.freenode.net instead. Further information over at http://bit.ly/19JILF.)
Some helpful resources are here, and this tutorial, which also includes basic commands.
Learn about IRC etiquette. Try here, here, or here.
For IRC under sugar, install the latest Sugar IRC activity.
In Pidgin you can configure IRC and then Add a Chat to your Buddy list. Select the IRC channel from the drop-down menu, and enter the name of the channel. You can set Pidgin to open channels automatically whenever it starts up.
In a traditional IRC client, you join a channel with the /join command, for example, enter /join #sugar in the input box.
Connect to one of the above channels, and say hello. You will see a list of the handles (on-line names) of the people in the channel, and the conversation will appear in a scrolling window. Type your message in the command entry area, and press return.
Instructions for using the meeting log robot are here.

Jabber Networks

While the OLPC XO-1 is designed with mesh wireless networking built in (where users can connect to each other without having a central wireless internet router/connection), Sugar users around the world may not be able to connect with others using the platform unless it's through the Internet, since mesh networking relies on a concentration of users (for example, in a classroom, school or business environment).

Jabber networks link Sugar users to each other in order to chat, interact and collaborate. There are global Sugar Jabber networks, or regional ones hosted by organizations and individuals around the world. You can choose whichever Jabber network you wish to connect to. Connecting Sugar to one of these networks will greatly enhance your Sugar experience.

See olpc:Jabber and
olpc:Community Jabber Servers

Video

OLPC TV is dedicated to collecting videos related to OLPC. The site needs help recoding videos to play in Gnash, the Free Flash viewer.
Dailymotion have an OLPC-compatible portal at olpc.dailymotion.com with videos encoded with the free OGG Theora/Vorbis codecs, and they have OLPC-relevant content.