User:Holt

• Embrace Support as explicit strategy

 More than an afterthought, more than usability hunches, and rather in
 the footsteps of Greg Smith and the 200+ support volunteers I decided
 to recruit starting in December 2007.  Let's expand the mandate of Sugar
 Labs into the treacherous world of supportive support, and friendly
 documentation -- where Quality feeds on itself, when users and volunteers
 are all tired of being users -- and help each other get back to learning.

• Crack Open Volunteerism & Mentoring

 Far beyond Sugar's existing developer constituency, eg:
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program
 We must all Renew Our Message, and focus on people who are natural
 "connectors" building a Community Projects Platform that invites gradual
 engagement and commitment -- and avoid scaring away our most loyal &
 resourceful grandparents unfamiliar with irc!  Participatory
 communities need sunlight, water and modern tools; a majestic forest
 will come.  Organized Community Mentoring within OLPC Contributors
 Program (which I overhauled earlier this year thanks to a dedicated
 team of volunteers) has proved instrumental to this end.

• Build Places for Teachers: Techie and Non-Techie

 Vividly illustrating how learning with Sugar might make their jobs
 easier, building lifelong Bricolage
 dreams in their kids, eg: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ClassActs/Resources
 I will work with the Red Hat-inspired http://teachingopensource.org
 initiative to match techie teachers with non-techie teachers to establish
 this critical social fabric.  Building a movement around diverse Grassroots
 Innovation means learning from our failures.  While I prefer the word
 Adoption to Deployment, XO/Sugar supporters spontaneously came together
 with me Sept 6-11 in Washington DC (with zero funding) to prove This Can Work!

• Bring Budgetary Authority to Sugar Labs from OLPC, and Others

 Our business is kids but our management must be adult if scalability is
 to be realized.  Credibility does not come overnight, and is even
 harder to establish in the funding battles of the non-profit world --
 but the time is now...

• Build Relationships around our Human Mission

 Nurtured by the expressivity of the telephone and the facetime of
 local groups, when digital immigrants need months to learn wiki/irc
 culture.  Community leadership means reducing "male" conflict,
 and increasing "female" active listening -- greatly deepening our
 culture of free speech and critique.  Not a testosterone culture
 of "free screech" scaring away earnest contributors.  But a genuinely
 Free and Open tolerance, marching forward into globalization every
 day, driven by more quiet consciences than will ever send us email.

• Cross-fertilizing Sugar/OLPC Local Labs

 Gratuitous travel exhausts our earth's vanishing resources.  But I
 paid for several trips around North America and Europe over the
 past 2 years for a reason -- to lay these seeds.  Now we can move
 our community-building beyond cultivating hobbyists into a learning
 organization, willing to both negotiate large contracts and
 decentralize delegated empowerment, accept other learning cultures
 with different curricular construction kits.  Washington DC is a
 perfect example: building Sugar/XO synergies with deployment
 expertise, physical XO libraries, a grassroots repair shop, monthly
 talks and a sophisticated network of nearby computer blubhouses.
 Similarly, I will be working hard with Mike Lee to seed a broad-based
 Sugar/OLPC group this fall in NY City, starting Saturday Oct 17 if
 you can hopefully join!  EG. The volunteer repair centers
 I coordinate worldwide for OLPC can now grow into a much stronger
 network with proper Care And Feeding.

• Now is the time to build a Broad-Based 21st Century Learning Movement

 I will substantially widen the spectrum of communications between
 Sugars Labs and OLPC to help pave the way for Sustainability over
 the coming decade, open to all meaningful partnerships, while always
 protecting our organic grassroots.  This will not be easy, but the
 lifelong friends I've made over the last 2 years in the OLPC/Sugar
 community will make this possible.  Kids need healthy families to
 explore their worlds, not tabloid divorces, to advocate for
 1 billion small-but-growing brains on this planet.  Sugar Labs and
 OLPC owe it to the world's children to similarly mature into
 responsible, playful, lifelong parents!  Even if not always loved :)