User:Walter/Goals

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Goals for 2010

Proposed 2010 goals for Sugar Labs (very rough first pass)

1. Release Sucrose 0.88 and 0.90 in order to provide a more useful and stable learning platform for deployments and developers
   1. Release Sucrose 0.88 in March
   2. Release Sucrose 0.90 in November
   3. Deliver a product that has been well tested for usability and accessibility needs
   4. Make successful launches with great marketing campaigns
   5. Promote corresponding SoaS releases with Fedora
   6. Define Sugar 1.0 so that we can begin partnering with long-term stable distros, such as RHEL
2. Make Sugar the learning platform of choice for 2010
   1. Support existing local user groups (e.g., local Sugar Labs) and work to create new ones
   2. Have SL representation at major free software and education events
   3. Establish relationship with third-party solution providers to help them understand the benefits of Sugar
   4. Work with other learning programs that complement our efforts
3. Explore Sugar in the context of mobile devices and web-based services
4. Make Sugar Labs the place for working on learning-related technologies
   1. Provide forums for teachers and developers to collaborate
   2. Provide a forum (similar to ASLO) for learners to share their work
   3. Demonstrate leadership by providing great tools for the appropriation and application of knowledge
   4. Always ask: how does this impact the learning
   5. Let downstreams such as deployers and vendors lead development by providing human resources
5. Eat our own dogfood
   1. Promote free software
   2. Be transparent and open to critique
   3. Encourage new people to join our project

It has been proposed that rather than in addition to (having communal goals helps individuals frame their personal goals) having overarching goals that everyone in SL runs towards for 2010, we ask everyone within the SL community to state and document (perhaps on their user page, announced to IAEP and Planet) their individual SL goals for 2010, so people can easily find areas of intersection-of-interest that would advance SL's mission - if enough people pick up on the same goal (individually), then it becomes a de facto "community goal."

Individual goal statements

• Mel Chua 2010 goals (draft)
• Tomeu 2010 brief statement of goals

5-Year Goals

ROUGH DRAFT

Given the pace of social, economic, and technological change, it is difficult predict what the context for Sugar Labs will be in 2015. However, we can frame our goals on some relatively stable ground: the developmental needs of young learners will not change; the value of a Constructionist approach will elusive to formal measurement but obvious to parents and teachers who see it in practice; and the disadvantaged (e.g, the poor, women and children) will need the affordances provided by learning. Less certain is the future of Free Software—personally, I think that its numerous advantages will be better recognized and it will be an obvious choice for education. (Not the only choice, but particularly well suited for making progress towards the sub-goals of "meaning and significance" and "conceptual understanding". Sugar will be used as much, if not more, outside of the formal classroom setting, where young learners will build upon their classroom experiences.) The answer to another question, the extent to which learning becomes "cloud-based", is to me less certain. It is hard to ignore the dramatic rise in numbers and reach of "smart" phones, it is hard to imagine even in 5 years that an affordable infrastructure will be available to support a primarily on-line learning experience for most children. "Under a tree" collaboration will remain central.

In five years:

1. Sugar will be the learning platform of choice (our bottom-up adoption rate by teachers and parents will out-pace our top-down adoption rate by ministers and administrators):
   1. We will have a stable, "proven" platform that is easily customized;
   2. We will have well-established channels of communication with and among teachers and parents;
   3. We will have simple, robust distribution channels.
2. There will be local Sugar user groups measured in the 10000s:
   1. These groups will be providing most of the support and development of Sugar;
   2. Sugar activities will number in the 100000s and 99% of these will have been written by teachers and children;
   3. Sugar will be integrated into computer science and education school curricula, providing a talent pool for the local labs.
3. Sugar, while still being primarily a stand-alone platform, will work fluidly within the context of mobile devices and web-based services.
4. Sugar will remain focused on the needs of learning. (While the platform itself will be adopted and adapted for other problem spaces, the focus of the Sugar Labs community will remain: "how does this impact learning?")
   1. We will continue to promote Free Software;
   2. Be transparent and open to critique;
   3. Encourage new people to join our project;
   4. We will enable individuals to be expressive with Sugar such that they can pursue their own goals and we will have a mechanism for sharing those goals and successes.