December 18 2024 Meeting

Attending

Devin Ulibarri (SL executive director, board)
Walter Bender (SL Inc. board)
Claudia Urrea (SL Inc. board)
Sumit Srivastava (SL Inc. board)
Sebastian Silva (SL Inc. board)
Chihurumnaya Ibiam (community member, GSoC admin/mentor)

Absent

Samson Goddy (SL In. board)

Agenda

Welcome new board members
Website updates by Devin
Discussion and reflections about GH Grant -- Devin and Walter
Fundraiser report from Devin
Revenue generating product brainstorming Sumit
Updates on setting up AWS for our gen-AI projects, led by Ibiam and Walter (if Walter is available).
Discussion of GSoC 2025 -- what projects would we like to focus on?
Anything else?

Welcome new board members

icarito (Sebastian Silva)

It's been perhaps 10 years since I've been involved. I thank everyone who's kept SL going and Devin Ulibarri especially for the leadership

I come from having supported original Sugar deployments on OLPC laptops in Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, organizing local groups to promote software freedom and constructionism in the region

In the past years I've worked as a programming coach at Laboratoria, a feminist organization. I've written a few programming-learning gadgets. I've also been involved in a few laptop deployment projects with Repurpose-IT.org. It pains me that we still don't have a constructivist learning environment that free desktops can use, so that's why I'm back :-)

Devin Ulibarri

I'm Devin Ulibarri. I've been involved with SL for about ten years now. I became interested in it after I discovered free/libre/open source software and was like, "whoah, this must have big implications for education." Then I saw a talk by Walter Bender.

SL very much interested me because it translated what was then a theory for me into actual results (e.g. more than half the patches being made by kids). Then, I sent Walter an email, and we've been working together for the past ten years on what is now Music Blocks.

Last January, I stepped into the role of executive director.

Sumit Srivastava

Hi, I am Sumit Srivastava, I built a regionally popular edtech startup, a leading medical search engine in India, I was a part of the Demis Hassabis (2024 nobel recipient) backed Entrepreneur First, contributed as a researcher to a stability AI LLM lab, have been involved with Sugar Labs since past 7-8 years. I also dabbled with creating constructivist learning groups for design and programming in Asia. Currently I'm working on a new AI product.

Website updates by Devin

The main takeaway is that we've continued to make progress. There's a lot of activity in #sugarlabs-web:matrix.org and on Github, and it's become a place for new contributors to learn how to make pull requests and bug reports.

Specifically, we created a new donation banner, which we can have up during fundraisers (you can see it now at https://sugarlabs.org). We're currently working to add more Sugar Stories (and make that a little easier to navigate).

We have a volunteer Ubayed Bin Sufian who is also updating the leadership page with the new BoDs. It's its own Constructionist project, which is nice for us.

Discussion and reflections about GH Grant -- Devin and Walter

The gist is we did not get the grant after a lot of work by Devin (and some work by me, Claudia, and Samson)

There were some issues: (1) they are really focused on code creation facilitation; (2) they are very nervous about < 13 years for liability reasons.

But I think they also have a blind spot about the power of git in terms of pedagogy. They don't seem to appreciate the reflective nature of git the way we do.

git is a "powerful idea" in the Papert sense and that we should leverage it more broadly than with just co-pilot-like activities.

Action: Sumit will reach out to the former CEO of GH to arrange a meeting to discuss "git and learning".

GH were also hesitant with our approach to COPPA and GPDR (GDPR?) compliance.

My guess is getting a full consultation on this would be expensive. But it's something we should keep on the radar.

The cheapest thing we could do is consult a lawyer and write an article about how our approach is compliant (although different than what most people expect). From what I could tell, we are compliant. But having an article would help (and a lawyer's advice to make it "authoritative").

(Most people expect us to collect emails and have people log in.)

Action: Devin will consult with the lawyer re COPA compliance.

Fundraiser report from Devin

We received about ~$800 total from this fundraiser so far.

A lot of the donations come in right after sending an email, publishing to social, etc. Mainly, we are still building a list of people to reach out to, and people are not yet used to donating to us.

This has been slower than I had hoped to change.

Action: Sumit and Devin to reach out to some "exited" founders.

callaurrea: We may need to write more about the gen ai work so it is not about learning about AI, but about using

Sumit Srivastava: "learning from the AI"

walterbender: It is using AI to help you dig deeper into whatever Microworld you are exploring. And using AI as one more tool for reflection.

Action: A White Paper on our approach to AI (Devin?, Walter?, Sumit?, Claudia?)

Revenue generating product brainstorming Sumit

walterbender: Note that there is now a fund-raising mechanism built into FlatPak if we want to use it

Sumit proposes doing a product that a startup would build in education but it might be better for the world if a non profit built it? like for example, building the best AI tutor in the world?

Focus is critical.

To be continued.

Updates on setting up AWS for our gen-AI projects

Qixiang and Kshitij have been able to write their logic for Pippy integration in fastapi.

Some testing issues remain.

GSoC 2025 ideas

Sorting out dependency issues with Sugar, MB, other?

AI-assisted debugging for MB

Video color analyzer for MB/TB

Proposal ideas go here: https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC

Oversight Board/Meeting Minutes-2025-01-08

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