Changes

===Sugar Digest===

===Sugar Digest===

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.

1. As is evident from Gary Martin's SO map of this past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list, the pilot programs that Caroline Meeks and I are running at the Gardner Pilot Academy and the Lilla G. Fredrick Pilot Middle School are foremost on my mind. We are working with three grade-level groups: second graders who are studying geography (through the lens of their community), number lines, and clocks; third graders who are also studying geography and the application of their math facts to problem solving; and sixth/seventh graders who are doing a digital storytelling exercise.

This was the first time that GUADEC and Akademy 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) touched 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.

Mel Chua, Anurag Goel, and Greg Smith ([http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-July/007065.html 1], [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-July/007168.html 2], [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-July/007038.html 3]) have written extensive notes of their observations of our prelimary interactions with these young learners. In gisting my own observations, I found that the students are engaged, able to work at their own pace, each achieving a sense of accomplishment. They stay on task, help each other, and excitedy discuss their discoveries.

As usual, I used Sugar (and Turtle Art) to give my presentation. While most people had heard of Sugar, it seemed that few had actually seen it in action. The overall reaction was positive and we will undoubted get some new contributors as a result of this renewed exposure to the desktop community. (We already have a volunteer to work on the touch-screen interface.)

There are lots of little details in the interactions that have been revealed even over this short period, things such as the ease with which the children were able to insert their USB keys into a USB extention cable as compared to the difficultly they encountered with even USB slots on the front panel of the desktop; and the in-retrospect obvious need to use integer rather than floating point notation in Turtle Art. (The second-graders thought that 100.0 was one thousand.) At the Fredrick School, we sent sticks and helper CDs home with some of the children over the weekend. Only two out of five were able to launch Sugar at home, but two of those who were unsuccessful had been given no instructions at all, even to know that you need to insert the helper CD in before booting from USB. We will report new numbers next week.

My keynote was sandwiched between Robert Lefkowitz (r0ml) and rms, who have markedly different positions re Free Software. I was sitting between the two of them at a post-talk press conference, which was—for me—entertaining. In regard to Sugar, rms acknowledged the point that learning can play an important role in appreciating, hence sustaining freedom—it was nice to make that connection. One concern r0ml raised was that there are powerful intermediaries between the developer and the user that are the real power brokers. I argued that Sugar on a Stick was an example of disintermediation in the context of schools—the IT department need not be involved at all.  

2. Bernie Innocenti and I were invited to OSLO to present Sugar to the Nokia QT software team. After an overnight flight, I went right from the airport into a conference room and began my presentation, running jhbuild from my laptop. About half-way through my presentation, my laptop overheated and died. Not to be detered, I pulled out a USB key, borrowed a laptop, booted Sugar and kept going. The presentation was not as smooth as I would have liked, but the room full of engineers was pretty forgiving and noted that the only thing that didn't crash was Sugar itself. The QT team expressed interest in a wrapper around existing QT/KDE education projects such that they could be run from Sugar—most of this work has already been done. They'll also start investigating the work involved in adding QT bindings to the Sugar toolkit so that QT activities could more directly leverage the Sugar platform.

A related point that r0ml made is that most people cannot program, so Free Software is a limited use to them. In response, rms said that they are still free to use it and redistribute it and even hire someone to make modifications. I went further, saying that they are free to learn to program and that the next generation ''will'' learn to program, since computation is our most powerful tool of expression. We owe it to them to help them achieve literacy.

3. Wayan Vota talked me into engaging in an "Educational Technology Debate" on [http://edutechdebate.org/archive/individal-and-communal-computer-usage/ Individual and Communal Computer Usage]. I sidestepped the topic and used it as opportunity to talk about software.

 

It was a pleasure feeling the heat as I walked the kilometer along the promenade between the hotel and the auditorium after all the rain and cold we have had this spring and summer in Boston. Thanks are due to my host David Neary, who introduced me to a great tapas restaurant—the sardines were really tasty.

===In the community===

===In the community===

2. Representatives from Sugar Labs Colombia will be at the [http://www.campus-party.com.co/index.php/software-libre.html Free Software area in Campus Party Colombia] this week. (Campus Party is the largest technology event in Colombia.) On Wednesday night, they will introduce Sugar Labs and the Sugar Labs Colombia Foundation at an one-hour conference, "OLPC y Sugar en Colombia Construyendo software para aprender a aprender." They'll be demonstrating Sugar on a Stick, Sugar LiveCDs, Sugar on a variety of hardware platforms, including the OLPC XO-1, the Intel Classmate, etc.

4. Simon Schampijer has posted a [[Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009|page in the wiki]] with information about the November 2009 Sugar Camp in Bolzano, South Tryol, part of Software Freedom Week.

(See [http://www.campus-party.com.co/tl_files/Campus-Colombia/2009/general/campustv/ webcast]).

4. There will be a Sugar track at the [http://www.freesoftwareweek.org/ Free Software Week] in Bolzano, Italy, the week of 9 November 2009. We will likely start the Sugar Hackfest the weekend before in order to accommodate the restricted schedules of some of our community members, e.g., students. Free Software Week (and [http://www.sfscon.it/2009/ South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2009]) is sponsored by [http://www.tis.bz.it/ TIS innovation park].

5. Aleksey Lim has been working on an implementation of a redesigned Sugar toolbar. There is a [http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/toolbars_aleksey.ogv screencast] showing Write running with a first pass at the toolbars. While more refinement and testing are necessary, the initial look is quite promising—it seems that it should enhance discoverability, especially for early readers. One problem it addresses explicitly is the need to have some tools always available, e.g., Stop. You can follow the progress and the discussion on the Sugar Developer list.

5. Bastien Guerry reports that James Clayson is organizing [http://www.aup.fr/news/special_events/constructionism2010.htm a conference about Constructionism] at the American University of Paris in 16–20 August 2010. Sugar Labs should consider how it could participate.

6. While we strive to make Sugar discoverable, we don't have complete success. Ed Cherlin has started a page in the wiki titled "the undiscoverable" to describe Sugar features that you might have difficultly discovering on your own. Feel free to contribute.

===Tech Talk===

7. Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Gilliard, Sugar is now listed in [http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090706#waiting Distrowatch].

6. Roadmaps: There are two roadmap discussions underway: Sucrose 0.86 and Sugar on a Stick V2. Both are detailed in the wiki. Your timely input would be appreciated.

8. Aclso heck out Aleksey's work on [http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/versionsupport-project/repos/mainline/blobs/raw/1261a49d3e97c827b86acb48f64ab85c722e8fdf/datastore-redesign.html the datastore].

===Sugar Labs===

===Sugar Labs===

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-Jun-27-Jul-3-som.jpg|SOM]]).

9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-July-4-10-som.jpg|SOM]]).  

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===