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→Sugar 2019-2021
== Sugar 2020-2020 ==
2020 has been a challenge for everyone and Sugar Labs has not been spared some of consequences of a global pandemic. We have a skeleton set of developer/maintainers and have had little opportunity for outreach either to expand our community or the community of our users. I remain passionate about Sugar, but we missed some important opportunities over the years that would have led to mass adoption rather than niche use. For example, being forestalled in working with Nokia -- they were trying to position us as an alternative to Android. In large part OLPC kept Sugar Labs at arms length from their deployments -- hence we had very little direct contact with our end users -- with some exceptions, e.g., Paraguay Educa -- which is still active. Our involvement has been maintenance, which I think confirms the analysis of James (See http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2020-October/058708.html).
That said, even though it is a bit long in tooth, I think Sugar is still an important expression of many ideas that have yet to find their way into the mainstream and can and should be used as a way to promote these ideas -- whether or not they are ultimately realized in Sugar deployments. The Journal/portfolio, the collaboration model, our approach to FOSS -- providing scaffolding to exercise one's freedoms, and more.
And some of the Sugar activities are still quite viable and are seeing a new life -- either rewritten for Sugarizer or repackaged in Flatpak, where they are then available on any GNU/Linux desktop.
Several topics James did not mention:
The bulk of my personal contributions over the past 5-6 years have been to Music Blocks, one of the most active Sugar Labs repos. I focus there in part because I wanted to have my efforts reach a wider audience -- anyone with access to a browser can use it. (Like Sugarizer, it is also available in the Google Play Store, and in Flatpak. Ironically, it does not work inside Sugar itself at the moment.) But there are several other reasons. Since "you cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something", I wanted to work on a "microworld" that was about something and I had long wanted to scratch a particular itch: music. I seized the opportunity when I met Devin and it has been a vehicle for lots of personal learning. As a stand-alone activity Music Blocks is getting a lot of traction -- including wide-spread adoption in Japan and Peru. And we have 100+ contributors -- new ones popping up all the time. But Devin and I also have another agenda. We think that Music Blocks could provide a vehicle for musicians to expand their repertoires into programming and hence expand their job prospects -- most musicians moonlight and why not moonlight teaching music through the lens of computation? We've also been developing a body of collateral material in support of this goal -- largely in the form of lesson plans.
Finally, I still think of Sugar Labs as a place where people can come to learn. We've been very active in programs such as Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in (alas no more). And while some of the participants have stuck around, almost all of them have learned something along the way -- about programming, about FOSS, about engaging a community, about pedagogy, etc. Supporting Sugar Labs as a place of learning motivates me.
My goals for 2020-2020:
* I remain convinced that Sugar would be a great environment for the platforms like RPi, especially if we develop/support some activities that more directly support the Maker community: the Maker community would seemingly have a natural affinity towards Constructionism and FOSS. We need to research what are the essential tools to that community and make sure that we support them. We also need to demonstrate that some existing Sugar tools are quite powerful out of the box. For example, Josh Burker's work (See http://joshburker.blogspot.com/2015/05/turtle-blocks-and-3d-printing.html) was done with Turtle Art.
* Less obvious perhaps is the home-schooling community, which has grown during the pandemic. Parents are desperate for new approaches and Sugar could offer one. We need to think about how to package Sugar for home-schoolers, including recommendations for how to use Sugar for learning, something that we seem to have often left to others. With that in mind, maybe we could team up with a local education program (I have one in mind) to get them to help us develop some collateral.
* One of the great pleasures of working within the Sugar community over the past ~10 years has been Google Code in. Since Google has decided to end that program, I would like to find a way to do something similar to engage secondary school students in our community. Of course it cannot start off at the same scale as GCI, but I am sure we could plant a seed that can grow. Some other FOSS projects have also expressed interest.
* Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. I am certain that if we have users we will be able to sustain a developer community. I have some ideas around marketing Sugar and there are undoubtedly better ideas in the community we should surface. One "idealet" is to distribute Sugar on a Stick to every member of the FSF. I am working with Ruben Rodriguez (CTO of the FSF) on putting Trisquel TOAST -- the latest version of Trisquel with the latest Sugar bits -- onto USB sticks which will be distributed in an upcoming FSF mailing. Just one idea among many.
== Sugar 2019-2021 ==
== Sugar 2019-2021 ==
My vision statement would be only slightly different that it was last time in that I am convinced that we still have a lot to offer as an organization. The circumstances have changed in that we are in the process of leaving the Software Freedom Conservancy, which means the board will have additional fiscal and oversight responsibilities.
My vision statement would be only slightly different that it was last time in that I am convinced that we still have a lot to offer as an organization. The circumstances have changed in that we are in the process of leaving the Software Freedom Conservancy, which means the board will have additional fiscal and oversight responsibilities.
== Sugar 2020 ==
== Sugar 2020 ==