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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, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

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, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

==Sugar Digest==

== Sugar Digest ==

1. I have fallen a bit behind in my writing because I had an unfortunate mishap while I was in Brussels last week: my laptop was stolen. My old laptop, which had been on life support before I had left for Europe was completely dead when I returned, so I am using my old old laptop, which works great as long as I apply pressure to the lower-right corner of the keyboard. Looking forward to getting a replacement machine at the end of the week.

1. I have been struggling with my end-of-the-year summary; I have

always been more interested in looking forward than looking

backward. Nonetheless:

2. Plan Ceibal, the one-laptop-per-child program in Uruguay, held an international conference in Montevideo on 30 November - 1 December. It was a great opportunity to catch up with some old friends from across the region (Gonzalo, Cecilia, Antonio, Laura, Patricia, et al.) and to spend time with many of the teachers and volunteers who have been participating in the program. I finally met [http://www.blogedu-rosamel.blogspot.com/ Rosamel!!] And I got reacquainted with the [http://ceibaljam.org/ Ceibal Jam] team; the students and faculty at [http://www.ucu.edu.uy Universidad Católica del Uruguay], where I gave a [http://www.fedaro.info/audios/ConfWalterBender.ogg talk]; and the [http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/ Butiá] project team, who uses a combination of Turtle Blocks and an Arduino board to turn the XO laptop into a robot -- very cool. (A favorite demo was when they used one laptop to control the robot, one to be the robot, and one to display the video from the robot's webcam -- a great use of the network and the plurality of laptops in Uruguay.) It is also worth noting that a number of commercial software companies are now participating in the project, offering Sugar activities (under FOSS licenses) to the children.

The numbers tell some of the story of 2010: we have almost 2-million

users, including 100% of the children of Uruguay; we had almost

5-million downloads from our Activity portal; we released Sugar

versions 0.88 and 0.90. The most telling number is 12, the

age of our youngest contributor.

I spent some time at Ceibal discussing Sugar and future directions for the project. Emiliano Pastorino showed me an activity he is developing that uses an RFID-tag reader to help children use their laptops to inventory cattle. I was so intrigued that I decided to add an RFID block to Turtle Blocks so that the children can use RFID in their programs. (The code is in git and will be part of Release 105.)

As Sugar matures, we are entering a new phase, where more of the

activity is in the hands of our user community. While we debated how

reaching out to each other and to us. While we debated how best to

mesh our development cycle with the needs of OLPC and the distros, the

deployments put together their own builds, meeting their own needs.

One mission I had for my trip to Uruguay was to bring an 'unlocked' laptop to ChristoferR, a twelve-year-old, who has been writing [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/user/1862 Sugar activities]. He was at the point where he needed root access in order to dig deeper into Sugar and the system. Thanks to Gabriel, Christofer now has a laptop that can be used for experimentation outside of the context of his school work. I discussed with Miguel Brechner the need to provide a scalable mechanism for unlocking machines in Uruguay -- today there are perhaps one dozen "Christofers" in Uruguay. Next year, there will be 100; in two years, 1000. Fiorella Haim, the technical lead for Ceibal, assured me that they have a plan in place to address this issue as part of the Sugar refresh scheduled for this summer.

As with any project, we have had some churn. Tomeu Vizoso and

Schampijer and Sascha Silbe are taking over responsibility for

Glucose; Peter Robinson is the new Sugar-on-a-Stick lead; Tom Gilliard

is advancing our efforts around virtual machine support. We have a

renewed engagement with the OLPC association in Miami, a group

dedicated to the original vision of the project. Activity Central and

Seeta are among the commercial enterprises offering Sugar support. We

have some prolific new activity developers, notably ChristferR and

Mulawa. I would be remiss in not mentioning the on-going contributions

of Aleksey Lim, who is touching every corner of the project. The Sur

community has increased its activity and presence in global

community. We have a board member from the South, weekly debates on

pedagogy in Spanish, led by Claudia Urrea, keep us focuses on our

mission. Meanwhile, Gary Martin has taken on the bulk of the design

infrastructure running. Of course, there are literally 1000s of others

contributing to Sugar development and Sugar deployments. Your efforts

are making a difference.

3. I went from Uruguay to Brussels to give a talk at TEDx. Before my laptop was stolen, I had a chance to use it to make my presentation -- a 10-minute mini-talk (using, of course, Turtle Art). I started my talk off with a picture of Bernie at my mother's house, surrounded by pies I had baked for Thanksgiving. I remarked that it is important to feed the hackers, but my real point was to argue that we make a distinction between the every day (low shelf) and the occasional (high shelf): my special recipes for Thanksgiving that I have to 'reach' for; my daily coffee is right at hand. The remainder of my talk was an argument for making computation be on the low shelf of every child. (I'll post a link to the video as soon as it is available.)

Flores and Micaela Acosta had twins, Nacieron Facundo and Sasha, born

on 27 December.

4. We have a new Sugar oversight board: welcome to our new members, Sebastian Silva and Aleksey Lim. Also, welcome back Chris Ball and Adam Holt. It is a great group and we have already had some heated discussions (See [[Oversight_Board/Minutes]]). We meet on most Thursdays at 15:00 EST (20:00 UTC) in #sugar-meeting on irc.freenode.net. Please join us.

 

to do. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s why we’re going to do

5. Sebastian Dziallas, the project leader for Sugar on a Stick, has [http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2010/12/moving-on.html bid us farewell]. It is not a surprise that the transition from secondary school to university has consumed him. Hopefully we will see more of him after he settles into his new routine. In the meanwhile, Peter Robinson has taken the lead. Best wishes to SDZ and many thanks for your contributions to the project.

it.’ some time in January. Meanwhile, thank you for the great effort

 

and great accomplishments of 2010.

 

6. Tom (satellit_) Gilliard has been making rapid progress on the Virtual Box version of Sugar on a Stick. It seems to be emerging as the most robust and facile way to get Sugar running on a wide variety of platforms, including the various Apple products. You can follow his work [[Downloads#Virtual_Machines_on_all_platforms|here]].

===Sugar Labs===

===Sugar Labs===

As always, Gary Martin has created some SOM diagrams of the discussions on the IAEP list.

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion

on the IAEP mailing list.

<gallery>

<gallery>

File:2010-Dec-4-10-som.jpg|2010 Dec 4th-10th (37 emails)

File:2010-Dec-24-Jan-01-som.jpg -- 2010 Dec 24th-Jan 1st (37 emails)  

File:2010-Nov-27-Dec-3-som.jpg|2010 Nov 27th-Dec 3rd (42 emails)

File:2010-Dec-18-24-som.jpg -- 2010 Dec 18th-24th (16 emails)

File:2010-Dec-11-17-som.jpg -- 2010 Dec 11th-17th (46 emails)  

</gallery>

</gallery>

Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more news from the Sugar Community.

Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

== Community News archive ==

== Community News archive ==