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Line 6: − + − 2. Study on the impact of ICT on educational outcomes: I spent an hour on phone with Nitika Tolani-Brown, a Research Analyst with the International Development Program at the American Institutes for Research. She and her colleagues are "conducting a comprehensive analysis of reliable research undertaken to date on the deployment of low-cost ICT to support education goals around the world with an emphasis on the developing world. The purpose of the study is to increase understanding of the impact of ICT on educational outcomes in children and adults and, ultimately, to generate an innovative research agenda to address salient issues." We discussed Sugar Labs, its goals and the status of the various Sugar deployments around the world. They are keen to get more input for their report. Feel free to contact Nitika (ntolani-brown AT air.org) or visit http://www.ictimpact.org with your thoughts on "current projects as they relate to the use of ICT in educational settings within developing countries, any evaluations conducted on these projects (or evaluations of other projects that you may know of), as well as your perceptions on the challenges users and developers of ICT solutions face and the future of this field." Their report will be posted publicly towards the end of the calendar year.+ − 3. Field reports: There have been some brief reports coming in from Sugar trials, notably Rodolfo Pilas's report on the olpc-sur list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-September/000614.html olcp-sur]) and Waveplace blog ([http://waveplace.com/news/blog/ waveplace blog]). Any and all feedback is enormously valuable: please speak up.+ − 4. Regional Sugar development teams: There are several regional initiatives in the formative stages that are looking for feedback in terms of how to best structure themselves. In an effort to increase the level of participation in the developing world, it is being proposed to build local teams to work full time on the further development and support of Sugar as a vehicle both for advancing the opportunity for a quality education for the children of the region and to create a viable community around free and open-source software, a major movement internationally that is fueling innovative technology and economic growth, but that has yet to take root in much of the developing world. Local groups are seeking funding for three years, after which they expect to have a self-sustaining enterprise that also serves as a focal point for entrepreneurship and job creation. Any input on how to best structure such initiatives and from whence to seek funding would be appreciated.+ + + + + + + + + − 5. FUDCon Brno 2008: Christoph Derndorfer reports from Brno that Sugar Labs had a strong presence at FUDCon (attending were Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Simon Schampijer, Bernie Innocenti—freshly back after 2 1/2 months of volunteering at OLE Nepal—Daniel Jahre, Christoph Derndorfer, and Greg deKoenigsberg). A presentation which focused on the Sugar platform, Sugar Labs and especially how the Fedora community can support the ongoing efforts was held at Saturday's barcamp. In addition Tomeu, Marco, Simon and Bernie spent a lot of time refining the 0.84 roadmap and feature plan. There were also many lively discussions about the current state of Sugar / Sugar Labs and many ideas, plans and to-dos for the weeks and months ahead were written down. They will be posted on the IAEP mailing-list and appropriate places in the wiki once everyone has recovered from [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008 FUDCon].+ − === Tech Talk ===+ − 6. Sucrose: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar release team has released the [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.82.1|Sucrose 0.82.1]] stable release. Owners of an XO can test it in in latest joyride or the stable 8.2 branch >= 758.+ − 7. Sugarbot: Zach Riggle reports progress on Sugarbot, a GUI automation utility for the automating the testing of Sugar Activities. Sugarbot supports continuous integration with Buildbot, so that multiple platforms and host configurations may be tested seamlessly; developers can more readily perform regression testing on their Activities, enhancing reliability and efficiency. A [http://code.google.com/p/sugarbot/downloads/detail?name=ScreenCast2.mp4&can=2&q=#makechanges screencast] of Sugarbot is available, as well as the [http://code.google.com/p/sugarbot/ package].+ − + − 9. X: Bert Freudenberg wrote the long-awaited X Activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X_Activity and download it from [http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b4/X-1.xo X-1.xo]). Thus Sugar now supports an X11 desktop as an Activity that can run regular X11 applications.+ − 10. Testing: There has been great feedback from various individuals and teams testing Sugar and Sugar Activities, including the "Wellington testers", Gary Martin, Douglas Ridgway, "Team Perú", and Mikus Grinbergs. Many thanks for your efforts.+ − 11. FLOSS Manuals: The manuals for a number of Sugar Activities are now published (including manuals for [http://en.flossmanuals.net/write_activity Write], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/terminal Terminal], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/chat Chat], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/browse Browse], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/record Record], and [http://en.flossmanuals.net/turtleart TurtleArt]). Please help us improve these manuals by going to http://en.flossmanuals.net/write where the editable versions reside. Note that we are including tutorials and notes to parents and teachers as part of the documentation effort. Helping expanding these sections would be greatly appreciated.+ + + + + + + + + + + − 12. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-August-30-September-5-som.jpg|SOM]]).+
Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)
Revision as of 10:34, 15 September 2008
, 10:34, 15 September 2008→What's new
=== Sugar Digest ===
=== Sugar Digest ===
1. Oversight Board: The Sugar Labs Oversight Board meet on Friday (See [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_5_September_2008_-_14.00_.28UTC.29|minutes]]). The bulk of the discussion was in regard to the formation of committees: David Farning will organize/liaison with the Membership committee; Greg Dekoenigsberg will organize/liaison with the Events committee; Bernie Innocenti will organize/liaison with the Infrastructure committee; Simon Schampijer will organize/liaison with the Test committee; I will organize/liaison with the Deployment committee. Please contact us if you have interested in participating on one of these committees. The next meeting will be Friday, 19 September at 14:00 UTC (10 AM EST) on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting—please join us.
1. Windows pain: It was announced this week that Microsoft would be conducting a pilot program in Perú with Windows running on the OLPC-XO hardware (Please see [http://www.minedu.gob.pe/noticias/index.php?id=6934]). This announcement has dominated the discussion on the Sur mailing list and has given rise to fear, uncertainty, and the spreading of much misinformation about GNU/Linux and Sugar. For example, it was posted to the list that one needed Windows in order to run Java and Flash programs and that one had to weigh the Write Activity against the hundreds of educational programs available for Windows. All that has been announced so far is a pilot; Perú remains committed to Sugar and FOSS.
It is important that the Sugar community keep united and focused on providing a great educational experience to children everywhere. We need to work together to demonstrate to decision-makers that Sugar and FOSS solutions will lead to improved learning and academic outcomes, improved national economic competitiveness through the development of a creative society, and that the total cost of technology ownership, including recurrent and “hidden” costs and external dependencies argues favorably for FOSS solutions.
2. Deployment Team: A Sugar Labs Deployment Team has been formed to voice and support the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community and to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and between Sugar user and Sugar developers (You can follow the development in the wiki at [[DeploymentTeam|Development Team]]). We plan to meet biweekly on irc.freenode.net, Channel #sugar-meeting as we begin getting ourselves organized. Minutes from the last meeting are posted in the wiki.
3. Guides to action: One of initial tasks of the Deployment Team is the creation of some guides to action. In parallel with the OLPC Deployment Guide we had written in support of large-scale OLPC/Sugar deployments, we are creating guides to community outreach (Yes Sarah Palin, we think community organizing is a useful and positive endeavor) and Small Sugar deployments, which we hope will facilitate more grassroots use of Sugar (Please contribute to these guides at [[DeploymentTeam/Guide_to_community_outreach|Guide to Community Outreach]] and [[http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/Small_deployment_guide|Small Development Guide]]).
4. Category:Stub: There are a number of pages in the wiki that could use some tender loving care. Please see [[:Category:Stub]] for a list of where you could help us with our documentation efforts.
5. Feedback: We continue to get helpful feedback from the field regarding Sugar and Sugar Activities. Of note is the blog being written by student in Australia being mentored by Bill Kerr ([http://xo-whs.wikispaces.com|xo-whs blog]).
6. Etoys refresh: Kim Rose reports that the Etoys team launched the redesigned [http://squeakland.org/ squeakland.org] website this week. There is much improved content and tutorials. It features a new Etoys release for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux which is compatible with the OLPC version now. Example projects are embedded in the website and viewable with the Squeakland browser plugin. On the XO, visiting these projects downloads them to the Journal instead.
7. FUDCon: Christoph Derndorfer wrote up notes from the Sugar Labs meeting at [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon FUDCon]. (For those of you not familiar with FUDCon, it is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. The name derives from FUD—an acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt, a typical tactic used by the opponents of free and open source projects to prevent their widespread adoption—and con—in opposition or disagreement with; against.) At the meeting, an impressive list of todos was generated (Please see [[Events/FUDCon_Brno_2008/Notes|FUDCon notes]).
=== Community jams and meetups ===
=== Community jams and meetups ===
8. Traducción jam: We are considering a translation jam the week of 20 October in Lima, Perú to translate the Sugar FLOSS manuals into Spanish (and Aymará)? If you are interested in joining us (in person or remotely) please contact with Raphael Ortiz (dirakx AT gmail.com) or me (walter AT sugarlabs.org).
9. Aymará jam: Yama Ploskonka organized the "Trasnoche de Traducción Aymará" in La Paz, Bolivia last weekend. He reports that despite the political unrest, about a dozen volunteers made progress towards an Aymará translation of Sugar.
10. K–12 Open Minds Conference: Sugar Labs will be represented at the [http://www.k12openminds.org/ Open Minds Conference] in Indianapolis at the end of the month. The conference, which is designed to make free and open-source software and system more available and easier to use by K–12 educators, will offer a great forum for feedback about how we can improve upon Sugar outreach efforts.
=== Tech Talk ===
8. Beagleboard: Koen Kooi reports that the basics (sugar, sugar-base, sugar-toolkit, sugar-presence-services and sugar-artwork) are now running on the beagleboard (See [http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/sugar-running-ångström sugar-running-ångström]).
11. Report from engineering: Simon Schampijer continued this week in fixing bugs and smaller regressions for the 8.2 release. In collaboration with nearly the whole tech team we landed the discard network history feature for the control panel #7480. Simon continued with Marco Pesenti Gritti to clean up the bundlebuilder so that rpm packaging of activities gets easier and did some work on landing the activities in Fedora rawhide. Meanwhile, Marco has been chasing down memory leaks in order to lesson the frequency of out of memory problems. He found a dbus-python leak for which he has submitted a patch upstream.
12. Sugarbot: Zach Riggle reported on his progress work on Sugarbot, a graphical user interface automation utility for Sugar. We hope to land his work in sugar-jhbuild and the buildbot soon, as it has potential for helping with testing as we continue to improve Sugar and the Sugar Activity community grows.
13. Pydocweb: David Farning has been testing a new tool, pydocweb, for writing API documentation. The tool can be used to collaboratively edit docstrings in a Python module (in this case, Sugar) via the web, and merging changes made easily back to the sources (Please see [http://sugarlabs1.xen.prgmr.com|Sugar Pydocweb]).
14. Activity updates: There are updates available:
:browse-98
:journal-99
:gmail-5
:etoys-92
:log-16
:read-52
:paint-23
:write-58
:implode-5
:terminal-17
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===
15. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [:Image:2008-September-6-12-som.jpg]). This week, the focus is clearly on the discussion about Sugar Labs membership.
==Sugar in the news==
==Sugar in the news==