Changes

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Election results: The Sugar community has cast their votes; the newly elected Sugar Oversight Board members are Walter Bender, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Chris Ball, Greg Dekoenigsberg, David Farning, and Bernie Innocenti. We'll be holding our first meeting on the #sugar-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net on Friday, 5 September, at 14:00 UTC. The agenda is available [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_5_September_2008_-_14.00_.28UTC.29|here]].

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.

I'd like to thank the acting board—including Hernán Pachas, Aaron Kaplan, and Ben Schwartz—for all their help over the past three months and also all the candidates who took the time to participate in the election.

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) 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.

2. Book sprint: Adam Hyde and Anne Gentle organized a Sugar book sprint last week in Austin. We had a large number of participants both in person and online; the results are impressive and hopefully of utility to the Sugar community. Please see [http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar Sugar Manual] and please help us improve the manual. (We also created a manual for the OLPC-XO laptop that is available at [http://en.flossmanuals.net/XO XO manual].) Many thanks to everyone who contributed, including Adam, Anne, David Farning, Mikus Grinbergs, Brian Jordan, Adam Holt, Janet Swisher, Morgan Collett, Yama Ploskonka, David Cramer, Emily Kaplan, Faisal Anwar, Christoph Derndorfer, Sandy Culver, Aaron Konstam, and the Sugar community.  

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.

3. LiveCD, LiveUSB: A LiveCd is important tool, as it makes it much easier for teachers to try Sugar in their classrooms (where often the school IT department prohibit teachers from install software on school computers). As part of the book-sprint effort (there is a chapter on Getting Sugar), David Farning led an effort to update the Sugar LiveCD and LiveUSB support. With much help from the community, we now have a script that builds LiveCDs and LiveUSBs. The script pulls from the latest Sugar packages (the previously available LiveCDs were based on a very old version of Sugar). We will begin hosting the .iso images for download on sugarlabs.org starting this week.

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.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

=== Community jams and meetups ===

4. OLPC Learning Club, DC: Kevin Cole reports from Washington DC that their learning club has been quite busy over the summer:

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].

* two video conferences with OLPC Ottawa, courtesy of Nortel Networks, which included a demonstration by the DC XO Repair Shoppe folks, and report by Mike Lee on his numerous activities;

* a teleconference with Anna Schoolfield, who was "broadcasting live" from the Birmingham, Alabama XO Expo;

Materials are available at http://olpclearningclub.org/.

The next meeting is scheduled for 15 November; Dr. Frank Linton, Sheng Zhao, and Matt Gallagher will present a tool for the automated periodic capture of audio data; with an example of its application to monitor honey bee health, part of an  interdisciplinary effort by the Arlington Public Schools STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Program.

Also, on 20 September, the club host another presentation by the XO Repair Shoppe guys: "Setting Up an XO Repair Center."

Finally, the club will join Ubuntu DC and HacDC as the upcoming the [http://tpff.org/ Takoma Park Folk Festival].

===Tech Talk===

=== Tech Talk ===

5. Goals: Simon Schampijer reports good progress on the Sugar Roadmap (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals|0.84 Goals]]).  

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.

6. Activity updates: There are new versions of several key activities available:

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].

* Journal 98 ([http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/journal-activity/Journal-98.tar.bz2 source]) Key features include a messages indicating when NAND is "getting full" and "critically full" and better RTL support;

* Read 50 ([http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/read-activity/Read-50.tar.bz2 source]; [http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Read-50.xo Read-50.xo]) Key fixes/features include fixing several problems involving shared documents; keeping a bookmark across sessions; and inclusion of a preview thumbnail image in the Journal for PDFs.

7. Activities survey: Morgan Collett has published a survey of the current state of support for many core Activities (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey Activities Survey]).

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]).

8. PlayGo: Andrés Ambrois has made significant progress on the Go Activity. Version 3 ([http://dev.laptop.org/~aa/PlayGo/PlayGo-3.xo PlayGo-3.xo]) includes Journal integration, options to set the board size, more robust collaboration, integration with GnuGo for playing against an AI, and scoring under Japanese rules. Andrés is hoping someone will design a "new kick-ass" icon for the Go Activity.

9. X: Bert Freudenberg wrote the long-awaited X Activity (See org.laptop.wiki.XActivity 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_activity Terminal], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/chat_activity Chat], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/browse_activity Browse], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/record_activity Record], and [http://en.flossmanuals.net/turtleart_activity 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.

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. 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-23-29-som.jpg]]).

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 in the news==

==Sugar in the news==