Oversight Board/2011/Meeting Minutes-2011-09-16

Team Reports

• Activity
• Deployment
• Design
• Development
• Documentation
• Education
• Infrastructure
• Marketing
• Platform
• Translation
• Wiki

Local Labs

• Germany
• Peru
• Chile

Goals

Short-term goals

Activity

• Finish implementation of the UI review with guidance of the Design Team.
• Write a criteria for inclusion of activities into the core activities group.
• Create a list of core activities, with the maintainers responsible for each one of them.
• Re-start Activity Team IRC meetings.
• Look to the Development Team for a best practice recommendation for GTK3, PyGI activity migration and Sugar 0.96 red flag day changes.

Design

• Write updated Sugar HIG.
• Work with Activity Team to finish implementation of the ongoing Activity UI review.
• Improve Home view Start new/Resume work flow.
• Improve Group view.
• Improve touch based UI support.

Education

• Finish writing up the report and recommendations from the Innovation in Evaluation meeting held in April, 2011
• Finish writing an essay on Fundamental Ideas on Learning

Infrastructure

• Raise the [bar] for adding new services: any new machine and web application must have one clear owner who accepts to be fully accountable for its maintenance.

Marketing

• Launch new website, with new content in particular screencasts

ready for localization.

• Define new strategy.
• Ramp up social media participation.

Translation

• High level of coverage of Glucose and Fructose projects for Sugar 0.94 release.
• High level of coverage in selected langauges taregeted for OLPC 11.3.0 release
• Improvements in i18n / L10n workflow through maintenance and enhancement of Pootle server infrastructure (i.e Pootle version upgrade) and it's interactions with version control systems (i.e. Gitorious).

Wiki

• Monitor OpenQwaq service development for potential collaboration with wiki services.
• Monitor mediawikiwiki:Extension:WikiEditor for sufficient maturation for our use.
• Monitor www.sugarlabs.org website plans for integration with this wiki.

Medium-term goals

Activity

• Promote co-maintainership of Core Activities.
• Identify code repeated in activities, and useful in sugar-toolkit, and help to improve it, doing easier the work to activity developers.
• Try to gather more feedback on actual activity use by children in deployments to help focus development effort (Journal metadata analysis, teacher feedback, deployment team feedback).
• Look to the Design Team to help work towards adoption of UI changes needed for the support of touch based interfaces.

Design

• Work on Sugar UI design changes for improved support on touch only based interfaces (e.g. virtual keyboard support).
• Revisit original Sugar design goals and see if any are able move forward (overlay chat, bulletin board, Journal object vs action view, Journal versioning UI, etc).

Education

• Design a portal for content sharing among teachers and Sugar users, i.e., a space for people to share objects, artifacts, and reflections
• Design a space for building connections between local curricula guidelines and Sugar activities

Marketing

• Build up the Marketing Team.
• Develop and launch merchandising.
• Improve trademarks protection.

Platform Team

• Support doing behaviors by providing useful distribution methods and various Sugar Doers' Kits.
• Connect doers and other learners (users) by developing services for a seamless infrastructure for sharing software, e.g., Activity Library.
• Extend the previous two goals to non-Sugar environments, not to sugarize them all, but rather to merge and promote Sugar software with and within the common Free Software and education ecosystems.

Translation

• Increase administrative efficiency and task automation (e.g. Pootle-git interactions).
• Chris Leonard has started cross-training on infrastructure-facing tasks, but both Chris Leonard and Rafael Ortiz should recruit and train backups / replacements for both community-facing and infrastructure-facing tasks. The infrastructure-facing tasks require elevated privs and so this must be a joint recruitment with the Infrastructure Team of a trusted individual.
• Maintain and enhance level of cross-talk between Translation Team and Release Teams (string freeze announcements, etc.).

Wiki

• Investigate inter-wiki searching options that would allow for joint searching of Sugar Labs and collaborator wikis.
• Seek collaboration on better separation and joining of information between collaborator wikis, i.e.,
  • Human Interface Guidelines and OLPC Human Interface Guidelines, where versions are diverging.

Long-term goals

Activity

• Design, develop, or support an activity (or Sugar shell component) useful to edit/create activities.

Education

• Digital textbooks incorporating Sugar activities

Marketing

• With funding, develop a media mix including advertising to reach teachers.
• With funding, commission recurrent market studies to better understand (a) teacher attitudes to information and communications technology (ICT) in the classroom and Sugar's competitors in particular and (b) market shares of major competitors.
• Work toward OEM deals beyond OLPC including joint marketing.

Translation

• Work on providing i18n tools and training to deployments to facilitate the sharing locally developed Sugar-based materials across deployments / languages.
• Continuing outreach to upstreams to enhance overall coverage of the FOSS ecosystem surrounding Sugar / OLPC builds.
• Continuous improvement of existing L10n projects through po-conflict analysis, term standardization, response to feedback from learners and deployments and providing i18n / L10n feedback to developers.

Wiki

• Seek more ways to automatically embed integrative links on mailing list posts, patchwork, gitorious, bugs, doc, translate, etc. products so Learners can easily navigate to the source.