Changes

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. I have spent much of the past two weeks finalizing the details of a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). We are proposing to create hubs of international collaboration, leverage the diverse capabilities of partner institutions, to conduct a longitudinal study of the Sugar program on a global scale. Drafting this proposal is a first step towards to goal of rallying universities around the world to address some of the challenges I raised in a blog entry last year [http://walterbender.org/?p=6 “A page from the Hilbert playbook”]. What attracted me to this particular program, [http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09505/nsf09505.htm Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE),] is that it encourages international collaboration. Sugar is global and to understand its impact, one needs to work globally.

We are on the eve of the release of Sugar (Sucrose 0.84). This is the second major release since Sugar Labs was founded and the community has shown great discipline in keeping to the release schedule while simultaneously making great strides in usability and stability. The complexity of the release process has been compounded by the fact that we are targeting a much broader base than previously. Not only are we working with many more GNU/Linux distributions (easily twice as many as with 0.82), but the LiveCD/LiveUSB distributions are playing a major role in our outreach strategy—supporting this diversity requires much more coordination and more testing cycles. As the new release is pulled into the distributions we'll undoubtedly get feedback about bugs—we are still too thin on the testing (Bug) team, but nonetheless, we are on a trajectory towards a much improved product that will reach many more children in the coming months.

2. I finally heard from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that [http://directory.fsf.org/project/sugar/ Sugar] is listed in their directory of free software projects. I hadn't ever noticed that on their homepage they say, "Free software is the foundation of a learning society – where the tools we all use are free to share, study and modify." Is the tip of their hat to learning new? In any case, it is great to see them acknowledging the synergy between free software and learning.

While much of work has been targeting low-level improvements, some user-facing Sugar (Glucose) highlights include "resume by default", which makes it much easier to access on-going projects and greatly reduces clutter in the Journal, and universal "view source", activated by "Shift-Alt-V". The community has also been busy enhancing Sugar Activities (Fructose). Old favorites have seen improvements and many new Activities have been added.  

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

The Localization team has been busy. We have almost complete support for more than 25 languages and almost 70 active language teams.

3. Mike Lee has posted some great photos from the DC Learning Club meeting, where they tried booting SoaS on a variety of netbooks (See

The biggest changes in terms of infrastructure are the switch over to Gitorious for project hosting and the recent addition of addons.sugarlabs.org. Gitorious makes Sugar truly a distributed project. No one gates adding new projects or forking of existing projects. The intelligence is "in the leaves" and now the control is in the leaves as well. Visit addons.sugarlabs.org if you haven't done so already. It is modeled after the Mozilla addon site and it is much more accessible for the user (and efficient for the developer) than [wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All the cumbersome wiki interface] we had been using. Further, it is designed for scale.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157614277170318/).

=== Help Wanted / Help Received ===

We are also on the eve of launching a static website as a series of landing pages for sugarlabs.org. Christian Schmidt and the Design Team have worked tireless to built a site that will be much more accessible to teachers and parents, many of whom have found the wiki to be impenetrable. Sean Daley and the Marketing Team have been helping fill in the many holes in the site's content and also turning my academic-speak into something comprehensible. A highlight of the new site is [http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite/index.php?template=page&page=learners a beautiful illustrated narrative] by graphic artist, [http://www.dongyunlee.com Dongyun Lee]. During a heated feedback process some great ideas for a children-oriented site that more directly interfaces to Sugar were voiced. Something to aspire to in the coming months.

4. It is dizzying trying to follow the pace of the activity leading up to the release of 0.84. Simon Schampijer and the release team are engaged in a testing sprint. You can join them on irc.freenode.net, #sugar. Interwoven with the testing of 0.84 is a flurry of work on Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)—indeed, much of testing is happening in that environment: Thanks to the hard work of Sebastian Dziallas and the SoaS team, Sucrose 0.83.6, the 0.84 Release Candidate 2, has find it's way into Sugar on a Stick (http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200902231225.iso). Aleksey Lim has been chasing down bugs seemingly across every package. And Sayamindu Dasgupta and the localization team have been very patiently updating the translations.

Kudos to Simon Schampijer and all the members of the Release Team., Sayamindu Dasgupta and the Localization Team, Bernie Innocenti and Dave Farning and the Infrastructure Team, Christian, Dongyun, Sean, and all the members of the Design and Marketing Teams, and all the Activity authors and the various teams at the upstream distributions who have been helping with packaging, debugging, and feedback.

5. Christian Marc Schmidt has been making great progress on the new static website (See http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite). We are still seeking more screenshots of the work of children using Sugar, i.e., "authentic" Sugar images.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

6. Lionel Laské has been looking into the use of Mono as a Sugar resource, opening up to us the .NET community. Please see his post, “Mono on Sugar for dummies”, on the French .NET community site (http://www.techheadbrothers.com/Articles.aspx/developper-mono-xo).  

* I'll be hosting a meeting of the Education Team this coming Friday (2009-03-07) at 15 UTC, 10 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

7. S. Page, in reminding us, "Don't bet against the browser", posted a link to a Pippy-like tool for Javascript (See http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/).

8. Sascha Silbe "finally managed to get Linux working" on his phone, so he couldn't resist installing Sugar (See [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04708.jpg [1]], [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04709.jpg [2]], [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04710.jpg [3]], and [http://sascha.silbe.org/photos/dsc04711.jpg [4]]). Sascha says, "No, it isn't really usable - only 64MB of physical RAM [5,6] means swapping ~30MB to SD just to start Sugar (no activities running). Sugar isn't touchscreen-"compatible" as well (there are no "plain" movements, just clicks and drags)." But it looks great.

* Homunq will be hosting a Google Summer of Code meeting on Wednesday (2009-03-05) at 17 UTC, 12 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-February-14-20-som.jpg|SOM]]).  

Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-February-21-27-som.jpg|SOM]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===