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Line 5: − + − 2. Guzman Trindad has posted some great videos of various physics investigations on the XO (See [https://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion-/videos-youtube-fisica-con-xo]).+ − 3. EduJAM! presented awards for [http://edujam2012.blogspot.com/p/nominados.html the best Sugar activities]. Although they were not singled out in any special way, the youth of Uruguay managed to walk away with six of the prizes. Congratulations to Christofer, Agustin, Daniel, et al. for your contributions. A tip of the hat to the adult contributors too: Flavio, Gabriel, Alan, Andres, and Alejandro.+ − By my rough estimate, approximately 10% of all Sugar activities have been written by kids who grew up on Sugar. It would interesting to understand the phenomenon. But we must be doing something right.+ − + − + − I solicited feedback on the specific goals for a New Co. Aleksey reminded us that [[What_is_Sugar|our stated mission]] as a community is much broader than just software development: we want our software to be used and we want to have a positive influence of other people writing learning software. We came together as a community because we share certain principles about learning and we want to help people to "embody these principals 'in the field'."+ − − In trying to answer my specific question, Aleksey Lim said: the "new organization should provide practices and procedures how to setup local deployment program in most useful way." and the "new organization should provide a way to forward funding... to particular program[s] and provide everything to make this funding open/clear for donators and easy handled by local deployment people." Finally, he posited that perhaps the "new organization will be a guarantee for institutions where local deployment happens (schools, etc.) to make them assured that even after finishing the program, there will be a way to get some help." − − Martin Langhoff raised some important points as well: "The _top priority_ should be to get stuff done with your own means...", that "the good name of SL is a precious asset based on work from a global effort", but we should "let each group do their own thing. It's their name, their reputation on the line." − − We'll be continuing the discussion at next week's Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB) meeting. Please join us. − − 5. On a personal note, my heart goes out to Marco Presenti Gritti, who posted on his [http://theoria.me/#cancer blog] this week that he has cancer. Marco was part of the team that created Sugar and was at my side when we created Sugar Labs. Marco: know that there are many people thinking of you.
→Sugar Digest
== Sugar Digest ==
== Sugar Digest ==
1. Sugar 0.96 has been officially released. You can read all about it at [[0.96/Notes]].
1. I am in Lima in transit to Amazonas, where I will be helping run a workshop for teachers. I had the opportunity to catch up with a few old friends from DIGETE, including Victor Castillo, Hernan Paches, and Rocio Flores. I also had a chance to see some exciting projects, including a nice collection of math activities developed by [http://www.uni.edu.pe/ Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería] in partnership with a private company, and some inetgration work by another local company, [http://www.advanceperu.com Advance Computer Corporation], which is distributing Sugar and GNOME on Fedora 16 across a variety of platforms. In their GNOME shell, they include Etoys and Scratch, and I pointed out that Turtle Art is also available.
The focus of the workshop will be to galvanize the teachers of the Amazonas region, to get them past the stage of just using the laptop to using the laptop for learning. We (a team from Sugar Labs, OLPC, DIGETE, and Escuelab) plan to engage the teachers in problem solving, where they learn to utilize Sugar to solve problems and to transfer these skills to their classrooms.
2. For those of you who follow the coming and going of the Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB), you know that we have been engaged in an [http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2012-05-30T21:08:10 on-going discussion about Local Labs]. The bottom line is that the structure we had envisioned when we created Sugar -- a loose federation of local labs working collectively towards a common goal -- is not viable under the more constrained structure of our parent organization, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). At the most recent SLOB meeting, we discussed new language [http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2012-05-30T21:08:10#i_2739410], [http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2012-05-30T21:08:10#i_2739421], [http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2012-05-30T21:08:10#i_2739445] proposed by the SFC for the Sugar Labs wiki essentially declaring that '''Sugar Labs Local Labs are not officially endorsed by or affiliated with Sugar Labs or the Software Freedom Conservancy.''' These changes were approved by SLOB by a vote of 5 in favor, 2 opposed. I will be making changes to the [[Trademark]] and [[Local Labs]] pages in the wiki to reflect these changes.
There is an on-going discussion as to how Sugar Labs and/or a New Company might be able to support the efforts of the numerous unaffiliated volunteers, developers, and deployment specialists who have created Sugar and educate others on how to use it. But in essence, a formal, affiliated Local Labs model is off the table.
I did learn that Christofer has been in an on-going dialogue with Rosamel Ramirez, a teacher in Duranzo about his activity development. Their latest collaboration is [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4572 JAMuliples]. Good stuff.
3. Last weekend, I was on a panel about business and technology at my 35th college reunion. I brought up the theme of entrepreneurship, arguing that it was a necessary component of any plan for economic growth. I went further to suggest that we could better prepare children to be critical thinkers and intellectual risk takers and help to instil a culture of entrepreneurship. I was pretty much slammed by the rest of the panel, who consider entrepreneurship to be an exception, not the rule. I think some of the disagreement is one of scale. When I speak of entrepreneurship, I am not talking about $100 billion IPOs. I am talking about small business. The titans of industry with whom I was debating seem to have no interest in small business -- perhaps because there is no money in it for Wall Street -- but small business is where most jobs are created and, arguably, where most innovation occurs. There is little, if anything we can do to influence the big boys -- yes, they are by-and-large male and white -- but we can learn to do our own thing and excel.
4. Some of you may be following the discussion about "New Co." on the iaep list [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-May/015272.html] and [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-May/015288.html]. To summarize, we are exploring alternative structures for Sugar Labs, which may well involve the creation of a new organization -- to augment our FOSS development efforts housed at the SFC -- to support the auxiliary operations involved with supporting the code in the field.
4. Agustin and Daniel are at it again: This time they are writing an animation activity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gwyIysrnfoc], [http://git.sugarlabs.org/animate]. While the current functionality is pretty simple -- you could do the same thing using a stack of [[TurtleArt#Media_Palette|Show blocks in Turtle Art]] -- they intent to move in the direction of non-linear editing -- a distinct hole in the Sugar activity repertoire.
3. Lionel Laské has written a [http://git.sugarlabs.org/enyo-test-activity "hello world" activity] using [http://enyojs.com Enyo]. It includes all the boilerplate code that is needed to display an index.html inside a Sugar-activity canvas. You can put your own "payload" in the "data" directory found in the activity bundle.
=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===