Changes

===Sugar Digest===

===Sugar Digest===

1. It was great to catch up with some old friends at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. John Palmeri (J5) and Chris Blizzard, both of whom were part of the original Sugar team were there, along with major contributors to the GNOME and KDE communities. Collabora was well represented, as were the Cairo and Gstreamer communities.

1. It was great to catch up with some old friends at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. John (J5) Palmieri and Chris Blizzard, both of whom were part of the original Sugar team were there, along with major contributors to the GNOME and KDE communities. Collabora was well represented, as were the Cairo and Gstreamer communities.

This was the first time that GUADEC and Akademy were combined their summits into one congress. It was clear there is much more in common between the two major GNU/Linux desktop communities than there are differences. While I largely talked about Sugar and the interdependency between FLOSS and learning, I also used my keynote as an opportunity to draw attention to the need for: better SVG support; a unified approach to collaboration on the desktop; a better and unified datastore architecture; and an amplification of our collective efforts in internationalization. I tried to make the distinction between simplifying complex things and using simple tools to reach to complexity and suggested that the current trends of the desktop accomplish neither goal. The latter, "learning-centric" approach should be our goal, since we take pleasure in complex things. I didn't have time to dwell on "the cloud", but Richard Stallman (rms) touch on the topic of Internet services in his talk. He saw them as a threat to freedom since the end user essentially cedes total control to the service provider. My issue is more narrow: we tend to be users, not creators of services. Yet there are many services that can amplify our ability to be expressive and engage in a critical dialog about that expression, so they have a role.

This was the first time that GUADEC and Akademy were combined their summits into one congress. It was clear there is much more in common between the two major GNU/Linux desktop communities than there are differences. While I largely talked about Sugar and the interdependency between FLOSS and learning, I also used my keynote as an opportunity to draw attention to the need for: better SVG support; a unified approach to collaboration on the desktop; a better and unified datastore architecture; and an amplification of our collective efforts in internationalization. I tried to make the distinction between simplifying complex things and using simple tools to reach to complexity and suggested that the current trends of the desktop accomplish neither goal. The latter, "learning-centric" approach should be our goal, since we take pleasure in complex things. I didn't have time to dwell on "the cloud", but Richard Stallman (rms) touch on the topic of Internet services in his talk. He saw them as a threat to freedom since the end user essentially cedes total control to the service provider. My issue is more narrow: we tend to be users, not creators of services. Yet there are many services that can amplify our ability to be expressive and engage in a critical dialog about that expression, so they have a role.