Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 16:22, 19 January 2009

What's new

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. Yesterday was Day One of Linux Conference Australia (LCA), being held in Hobart, Tasmania. I mostly hung out in the sessions on the business side of free and open source. David Rowe did a nice job advocating for open hardware--something we never were quite able to achieve when I was at OLPC. Most of the speakers delivered pragmatic talks: how to engage with government (Pia Waugh), with large companies (Bdale Garbee), marketing (Joe Brokmeier), etc. The last speaker of the day, Lawrence Crumpton, talked about Microsoft's embracing of open source; his talk was titled Did Hell Freeze Over? Alas, the title was the highlight of the talk. The efforts he described as successes were all shallow and clumbsy efforts at engagement with lots of strings attached. I don't think he once mentioned "free as in speech" and he essentially delegated FOSS efforts to the non-commercial sector. I, for one, remain skeptical. Actions will speak louder than words.

Pia and I did get started on a disucssion about how best to move forward with one laptop per child in the region. She is rightly still enamoured with the OLPC-XO-1 hardware, as it meets the needs imposed by the harsh environmental conditions faced in many of her potential deployment sites. We discussed strategies for building sustainable local support and the need for global cooperation in order to increase efficiency. We'll keep brainstorming. We've got a Birds of a Feather session at the end of the week that promises to bring more minds to the table as well.

I had dinner last night with Rob Savoye, among others. Rob continues to make progress on Gnash. He has some very nice results on the XO hardware—yes you can play Youtube videos and ys you can run a stand-alone SWF player for which we talked about putting together a simple Sugar wrapper. Rob's other big project right now involves finding workarounds to the plethora of proprietary codecs that encumber FOSS projects.

2. Occassionally my tendency towards addictive behavior emerges. I haven't been able to kick the habit of coding. I started working on the portfolio fork of Turtle Art last week during XO Camp and I wrote Python across the Pacific and I stayed up much to late last night after visiting some pubs coding. In the spirit of "eat your own dogfood", my goal is to get things into sufficient shape so as to be able to give my LCA talk using Turtle Art. I am close, but my Python and GTK skills are still pretty lacking. You can track my prgress in gitorious—I am making frequent commits—and feel free to submit patches!! And my apologies to everyone for lack of eye contact.

3. Gary Martin has being doing some great work in the wiki on our Getting Involved page (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved). Anyone want to tackle our About page, which is not very helpful.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

4. As mentioned above, on Friday afternoon, 23 January, is an OLPC BOF at linux.conf.au in Hobart. It is an open discussion to explore strategies for community development and paths forward for OLPC and Sugar in the region. We expect attendees from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

5. David Nalley blogged about Fedora and Sugar at the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts January meeting this past week. He reports lots of enthusiasm now that getting involved with OLPC development is as easy as getting involved with Fedora.

Help Wanted

6. Sugar Labs will be participating in Google Summer of Code. We are soliciting projects and mentors. Details soon.

Tech Talk

7. As several people have pointed out, Gdium is donating laptops to developers (See http://www.gdium.com/group/58/home) who might be interested in working on Sugar. The machines run Mandriva (which also runs on the Mobilis that is being considered for use in Brazil). Aleksey Lim has Sugar working on Mandriva (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Mandriva) and we hope to have Sugar packaged as part of the next release of Mandriva.

8. Tomeu Vizoso reports that he, along with Gary Martin and Ben Schwartz, has been "tricked" into starting a new mind-mapping Activity (See http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/mindmap). Some of the interesting ideas that they are exploring are:

the view widget can be embedded in a GNOME application
collaboration using both Telepathy and Groupthink, working both in GNOME and in Sugar

This could be a model for making Sugar Activities run both within and outside of Sugar.

9. Recent software updates:

TAPortfolio-3
calculate-28
chat-62
read-63
etoys 4.0.2205
Etoys-99
sugar-presence-service-0.83.3
sugar-datastore-0.83.2
telepathy-gabble 0.7.18

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

19 Jan 2009	Feeding the Penguins – The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009	OLPC News – Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009	Bill Kerr – thoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009	Ars Technica – OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009	OLPC News – An Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008	OLPC News – Sugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008	The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008	Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008	SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008	Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008	Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008	Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008	Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
16 Sep 2008	Open Source – Sugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008	OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008	Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008	Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008	OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008	PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008	Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008	LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008	Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008	Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008	Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008	The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008	Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008	BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008	OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008	PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008	MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008	News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008	Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
16 May 2008	Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008	xconomy – Bender 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 wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008	Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

9 Dec 2008	Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
15 May 2008	Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 === Sugar Digest ===
-. The announcement of changes at One Laptop per Child (OLPC) this week dominated the discussions on the lists, IRC, and in the hallway conversations at FUDCon and XO Camp. While it came as no surprise that OLPC was going to focus its efforts on deployments, largely leaving engineering, including software development, to third parties, the abruptness of the transition and its direct impact on so many talented and dedicated people was a surprise, even within the context of global economic upheaval.
+. Yesterday was Day One of Linux Conference Australia (LCA), being held in Hobart, Tasmania. I mostly hung out in the sessions on the business side of free and open source. David Rowe did a nice job advocating for open hardware--something we never were quite able to achieve when I was at OLPC. Most of the speakers delivered pragmatic talks: how to engage with government (Pia Waugh), with large companies (Bdale Garbee), marketing (Joe Brokmeier), etc. The last speaker of the day, Lawrence Crumpton, talked about Microsoft's embracing of open source; his talk was titled ''Did Hell Freeze Over?'' Alas, the title was the highlight of the talk. The efforts he described as successes were all shallow and clumbsy efforts at engagement with lots of strings attached. I don't think he once mentioned "free as in speech" and he essentially delegated FOSS efforts to the non-commercial sector. I, for one, remain skeptical. Actions will speak louder than words.
-I'd like to take this opportunity to extend say thank you to the engineers who have worked so tirelessly on the project for their leadership, both those whom I had the pleasure of working with when I was at OLPC—Eben Eliason, Jim Gettys, Scott Anahain, Michael Stone, and Henry Hardy—as well as many others—those who joined OLPC after I left—whom I learned to respect through my interactions with them while wearing my Sugar Labs hat. Having spoken with many of you, I know you will remain active in the Sugar community, even as you seek new opportunities.
+Pia and I did get started on a disucssion about how best to move forward with one laptop per child in the region. She is rightly still enamoured with the OLPC-XO-1 hardware, as it meets the needs imposed by the harsh environmental conditions faced in many of her potential deployment sites. We discussed strategies for building sustainable local support and the need for global cooperation in order to increase efficiency. We'll keep brainstorming. We've got a Birds of a Feather session at the end of the week that promises to bring more minds to the table as well.
-One of the reasons we started Sugar Labs nine months ago was that we anticipated these changes at OLPC. It was clear to many of us at the time that the Sugar learning platform could and should be made more widely available and that in order for Sugar to grow, it would have to become a community project, without extensive ties or dependencies on any single company or organization. The Sugar Labs community is expanding. The downsizing of OLPC's engineering efforts, while significant to OLPC deployments in the short term, is actually a catalyst for a needed change. It compels the deployments to be more self-sufficient and more interconnected. Indeed, one direct consequence of the events of last week is the acceleration of plans for local Sugar Labs around the world. A decentralize approach, where engineering investments in support of Sugar and learning are made locally, is one of our great strengths.
+I had dinner last night with Rob Savoye, among others. Rob continues to make progress on Gnash. He has some very nice results on the XO hardware—yes you can play Youtube videos and ys you can run a stand-alone SWF player for which we talked about putting together a simple Sugar wrapper. Rob's other big project right now involves finding workarounds to the plethora of proprietary codecs that encumber FOSS projects.
-Short-term contingency plans for supporting the current OLPC deployments were discussed at FUDCon and are a topic of discussion at XO Camp. While not all of the details of how the OLPC 9.1 release will be managed, the overall direction that is being taken is one that relies more directly on the upstream Fedora community. There remains at OLPC a core engineering team that will be able to liaise with Fedora (and Sugar Labs) to make sure that an OLPC-XO-1-specific dependencies are met.
+. Occassionally my tendency towards addictive behavior emerges. I haven't been able to kick the habit of coding. I started working on the portfolio fork of Turtle Art last week during XO Camp and I wrote Python across the Pacific and I stayed up much to late last night after visiting some pubs coding. In the spirit of "eat your own dogfood", my goal is to get things into sufficient shape so as to be able to give my LCA talk using Turtle Art. I am close, but my Python and GTK skills are still pretty lacking. You can track my prgress in gitorious—I am making frequent commits—and feel free to submit patches!! And my apologies to everyone for lack of eye contact.
-Long term, OLPC will undoubtedly directly leverage the efforts of the Sugar community as it continues down the path of integration with the various upstream GNU/Linux distributions. Having Sugar run everywhere only enhances their position.
+. Gary Martin has being doing some great work in the wiki on our Getting Involved page (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved). Anyone want to tackle our About page, which is not very helpful.
-. Meanwhile, we've all been busy this week, using FUDCon and XO Camp as an opportunity to meet face to face with many of of colleagues. Feature freeze Sugar 0.84 is at the end of this week and we have already begun discussion about our goals for 0.86. The various Sugar Labs community teams have been active. Christian Marc Schmidt continues to make great progress on a new landing site for [http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite sugarlabs.org]. Greg Dekoenigsberg is taking a lead role in the Sugar Labs Engineering Community (Caroline Meeks, David Farning, and I are reaching out to a number of potential partners to fill Greg's shoes on the Marketing Team.
 === Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===
-. There are numerous posting on the [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11 site] regarding what we accomplished at FUDCon this past weekend.
+. As mentioned above, on Friday afternoon, 23 January, is an OLPC BOF at linux.conf.au in Hobart. It is an open discussion to explore strategies for community development and paths forward for OLPC and Sugar in the region. We expect attendees from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.
-. You can follow along with the events of XO Camp [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 here].
-. We are still looking for someone to represent Sugar Labs at [http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/ SCALE] in LA in February.
-. I will be a Sugar Labs representation at [http://linux.conf.au/ LCA] next week. Mel Chua will also be traveling from Boston to Tasmania for the conference. We are looking forward to seeing our colleagues in Hobart.
-. OLPC Learning CLub DC will be holding a Family XO Mesh Meet up on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 (See [http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/jumping-into-2009-little-things-and-a-jam/]).
+. David Nalley blogged about Fedora and Sugar at the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts January meeting this past week. He reports lots of enthusiasm now that getting involved with OLPC development is as easy as getting involved with Fedora.
 === Help Wanted ===
-. Wade Brainerd had started a [[ActivityTeam| Sugar Labs Activity Team]] to develop and maintain the activities available for Sugar. The team encourages independent developers to write activities and will support them in those efforts.
+. Sugar Labs will be participating in Google Summer of Code. We are soliciting projects and mentors. Details soon.
-:Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high-quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.
-. We are still seeking help in regard to copy and illustrations for the new site. One project we have in mind is a comicbook-like narrative about Sugar to be featured on the static site. Also, we'd love stories from the field—from teachers, parents, and students, about their experiences and perspectives on Sugar. It is important that we communicate our message more widely and in language that is more approachable to the non-technical community.
 === Tech Talk ===
-. .xo vs .rpm: One interesting discussion at FUDCon was in regard to the format for Sugar Activities. You can follow the discussion in detail [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_on_Fedora:_RPMs_or_.xos%3F here].
+. As several people have pointed out, Gdium is donating laptops to developers (See http://www.gdium.com/group/58/home) who might be interested in working on Sugar. The machines run Mandriva (which also runs on the Mobilis that is being considered for use in Brazil). Aleksey Lim has Sugar working on Mandriva (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Mandriva) and we hope to have Sugar packaged as part of the next release of Mandriva.
-. Tomeu Vizoso has an illustrated blog (also in the planet) about [http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/01/what-ive-been-up-since-last-post.html all that he has been up to in the past weeks]:
-* reviewed and pushed Ryan Kabir's work on moving most of the actions from the palette of the Home View XO icon onto the Frame so that they are always accessible, regardless of which view you are in.
-* worked on the file transfer UI
-* added a utility class (util.TempFilePath) that hopefully will remove the temp file leaks we have been suffering in past releases
-* worked on removable devices in the Journal (They no longer use an index or write to the device without user action)
-* changed the Home View to display the last entries for every activity and resume by default when the icon is clicked.
-. I've released Verison 1.0 of a portfolio tool for Sugar [http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/2/2d/TAPortfolio-1.xo TAPortfolio-1.xo]. Preliminary documentation can be found on my user page [[User:Walter/TAPortfolio]]. TAPortfolio is a presentation Activity that lets you create multimedia slide shows from material retrieved from your Journal. The basic idea is to import objects from your Journal, along with descriptions and preview images, into slide templates, not unlike Powerpoint, and then show a presentation by stepping through them. TA Portfolio includes the typical major functions of presentation software: an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted (this is largely incomplete), a method for inserting images (from the Journal), and a slide-show system to display the content. What makes it a bit different than tools such as Powerpoint is that you can program your slides using TurtleArt blocks. TAPortfolio also has an export-to-HTML function so that presentations can be viewed outside of the Sugar environment. Feedback appreciated. (Version 2.0 should be available shortly.)
-. Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that Version 090110 of the XO-LiveCD is available for download from:
- ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso
-This release is still based on the stable 8.2 build:
- http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/8.2/build767/devel_ext3/
-but has significant improvements for the Live-System runtime environment:
-* A new Content/ directory tree improves the selection of activities, content collections and language packs as well as selection of additional RPM packages
-* There is a new pre-configured home/olpc directory tree packed as squashfs-image. The current version contains more than 50 activities.
-* Improved hardware detection and additional boot options especially to get more graphic cards working
-* Updated documentation, the topics "how to create a bootable USB Pen" and "how to install the Live-System on hard disc" have been improved
-Further information is available in the PDF document:
- ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.pdf
-For discussion and feedback Wolfgang invites you to join the mailing list:
- http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd
-Kurt Gramlich reports that if Wolfgang's server is overloaded, you will find a copy of the LiveCD here:
- http://www.skolelinux.de/download/XOLiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso
-. Hilaire Fernandes announced an alpha bundle of www.iStoa.net for Sugar. (iSTOA.net is a research project to build a platform for interactive teaching and monitoring the Internet. It is free and cross-licensed MIT.) There are about 40 "etayages" (a type of scaffolding) and all in all more than 150 exercises.
+. Tomeu Vizoso reports that he, along with Gary Martin and Ben Schwartz, has been "tricked" into starting a new mind-mapping Activity (See http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/mindmap). Some of the interesting ideas that they are exploring are:
+* the view widget can be embedded in a GNOME application
+* collaboration using both Telepathy and Groupthink, working both in GNOME and in Sugar
+This could be a model for making Sugar Activities run both within and outside of Sugar.
-The bundle can be downloaded directly from:
+. Recent software updates:
- http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/14090/iStoa.net-8.12-alpha1.xo
+* TAPortfolio-3
+* calculate-28
+* chat-62
+* read-63
+* etoys 4.0.2205
+* Etoys-99
+* sugar-presence-service-0.83.3
+* sugar-datastore-0.83.2
+* telepathy-gabble 0.7.18
 === Sugar Labs ===
-. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-January-3-9-som.jpg
+. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-January-10-16-som.jpg|SOM]]).
-|SOM]]).
 === Community News archive ===