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=== Sugar Digest ===
 
=== Sugar Digest ===
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I read the new Neal Stephenson book, ''Anathem'', last week. There was one line I cannot resist sharing with the Sugar community. Raz, our hero, is a young mathematician who leaves the nest to solve any number of problems. At one point, he asks why he is the one upon whom everyone is leaning.
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1. The announcement of changes at One Laptop per Child (OLPC) this week dominated the discussions on the lists, IRC, and in the hallway conversations at FUDCon and XO Camp. While it came as no surprise that OLPC was going to focus its efforts on deployments, largely leaving engineering, including software development, to third parties, the abruptness of the transition and its direct impact on so many talented and dedicated people was a surprise, even within the context of global economic upheaval.
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:"But Raz, you are <i>educable</i>, you can learn 'this kind of thing,'... You've spent your whole life ... becoming educable."
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I'd like to take this opportunity to extend say thank you to the engineers who have worked so tirelessly on the project for their leadership, both those whom I had the pleasure of working with when I was at OLPC—Eben Eliason, Jim Gettys, Scott Anahain, Michael Stone, and Henry Hardy—as well as many others—those who joined OLPC after I left—whom I learned to respect through my interactions with them while wearing my Sugar Labs hat. Having spoken with many of you, I know you will remain active in the Sugar community, even as you seek new opportunities.
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Another book I read over the holidays is a new biography of Andrew Jackson. He remains a pretty controversial figure, but he knew the importance of "staying focused on the things that matter most and not dwelling on the things that pull us apart."
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One of the reasons we start Sugar Labs nine months ago was that we anticipated these changes at OLPC. It was clear to many of us at the time that the Sugar learning platform could and should be made more widely available and that in order for Sugar to grow, it would have to become a community project, without extensive ties or dependencies on any single company or organization. The Sugar Labs community is expanding. The downsizing of OLPC's engineering efforts, while significant to OLPC deployments in the short term, is actually a catalyst for a needed change. It compels the deployments to be more self-sufficient and more interconnected. Indeed, one direct consequence of the events of last week is the acceleration of plans for local Sugar Labs around the world. A decentralize approach, where engineering investments in support of Sugar and learning are made locally, is one of our great strengths.
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In the case of Sugar Labs, the things that matters most are creating a great learning platform and making it available to learners everywhere.  
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Short-term contingency plans for supporting the current OLPC deployments were discussed at FUDCon and are a topic of discussion at XO Camp. While not all of the details of how the OLPC 9.1 release will be managed, the overall direction that is being taken is one that relies more directly on the upstream Fedora community. There remains at OLPC a core engineering team that will be able to liaise with Fedora (and Sugar Labs) to make sure that an OLPC-XO-1-specific dependencies are met.
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I am confident that in 2009, we will see Sugar in the hands of many more children and teachers. We'll see an accelerated pace of development and deployment across a diverse set of platforms under an even more diverse set of conditions.
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Long term, OLPC will undoubtedly directly leverage the efforts of the Sugar community as it continues down the path of integration with the various upstream GNU/Linux distributions. Having Sugar run everywhere only enhances their position.
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While we debate the various means towards our goals, we need to keep in mind that the most important metric we can hold up to our work is the impact on learning. On the one hand, we need to flexible and inclusive; on the other hand, we need to adhere to the core principles that make Sugar of value to the learner, putting an emphasis on quality over quantity. So while we shouldn't be overly zealous, we need to constantly remind ourselves and those whom we are trying to reach of the value of learning to learn: the authentic appropriation of knowledge, learning through expressing, debugging, reflection, and critique. If it does not impact the learning, we shouldn't be doing it.
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2. Meanwhile, we've all been busy this week, using FUDCon and XO Camp as an opportunity to meet face to face with many of of colleagues. Feature freeze Sugar 0.84 is at the end of this week and we have already begun discussion about our goals for 0.86. The various Sugar Labs community teams have been active. Christian Marc Schmidt continues to make great progress on a new landing site for [http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite sugarlabs.org]. Greg Dekoenigsberg is taking a lead role in the Sugar Labs Engineering Community (Caroline Meeks, David Farning, and I are reaching out to a number of potential partners to fill Greg's shoes on the Marketing Team.
    
=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===
 
=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===
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[http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11], which will be held this week (9–11 January) at MIT (Cambridge, MA).
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3. There are numerous posting on the [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11 site] regarding what we accomplished at FUDCon this past weekend.
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4. You can follow along with the events of XO Camp [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 here].
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5. We are still looking for someone to represent Sugar Labs at [http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/ SCALE] in LA in February.
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6. I will be a Sugar Labs representation at [http://linux.conf.au/ LCA] next week. Mel Chua will also be traveling from Boston to Tasmania for the conference. We are looking forward to seeing our colleagues in Hobart.
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7. OLPC Learning CLub DC will be holding a Family XO Mesh Meet up on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 (See [http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/jumping-into-2009-little-things-and-a-jam/]).
    
=== Help Wanted ===
 
=== Help Wanted ===
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Christian Marc Schmidt has been working on a static landing page for Sugar Labs. (The wiki is a powerful tool, but not the easiest place to get started from when you are new to Sugar.) Christian has uploaded a build onto a server (See [http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/betasite beta sugarlabs.org]). This version is fully dynamic, based on an XML->XSL translation using PHP 5 and Libxslt. Christian has tested it in all major browsers where it seems to work fine, but please exercise it some more.
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8. Wade Brainerd had started a [[ActivityTeam| Sugar Labs Activity Team]] to develop and maintain the activities available for Sugar. The team encourages independent developers to write activities and will support them in those efforts.
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:Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high-quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.
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9. We are still seeking help in regard to copy and illustrations for the new site. One project we have in mind is a comicbook-like narrative about Sugar to be featured on the static site. Also, we'd love stories from the field—from teachers, parents, and students, about their experiences and perspectives on Sugar. It is important that we communicate our message more widely and in language that is more approachable to the non-technical community.
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=== Tech Talk ===
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10. .xo vs .rpm: One interesting discussion at FUDCon was in regard to the format for Sugar Activities. You can follow the discussion in detail [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_on_Fedora:_RPMs_or_.xos%3F here].
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11. Tomeu Vizoso has an illustrated blog (also in the planet) about [http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/01/what-ive-been-up-since-last-post.html all that he has been up to in the past weeks]:
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Christian is ready to concentrate on gathering content for the gallery and the activity sections. There is other content that needs to be prepared as well.
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* reviewed and pushed Ryan Kabir's work on moving most of the actions from the palette of the Home View XO icon onto the Frame so that they are always accessible, regardless of which view you are in.
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* worked on the file transfer UI
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* added a utility class (util.TempFilePath) that hopefully will remove the temp file leaks we have been suffering in past releases
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* worked on removable devices in the Journal (They no longer use an index or write to the device without user action)
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* changed the Home View to display the last entries for every activity and resume by default when the icon is clicked.
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As far as internationalization, we are thinking of adding a simple CSS dropdown underneath the links on the top-right edge of the page. We should decide how best to handle the translations, whether through Pootle or some other mechanism.
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12. I've released Verison 1.0 of a portfolio tool for Sugar [http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/2/2d/TAPortfolio-1.xo TAPortfolio-1.xo]. Preliminary documentation can be found on my user page [[User:Walter/TAPortfolio]]. TAPortfolio is a presentation Activity that lets you create multimedia slide shows from material retrieved from your Journal. The basic idea is to import objects from your Journal, along with descriptions and preview images, into slide templates, not unlike Powerpoint, and then show a presentation by stepping through them. TA Portfolio includes the typical major functions of presentation software: an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted (this is largely incomplete), a method for inserting images (from the Journal), and a slide-show system to display the content. What makes it a bit different than tools such as Powerpoint is that you can program your slides using TurtleArt blocks. TAPortfolio also has an export-to-HTML function so that presentations can be viewed outside of the Sugar environment. Feedback appreciated. (Version 2.0 should be available shortly.)
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One specific area where we are seeking help is in regard to illustrations. One project we have in mind is a comic-book-like narrative about Sugar to be featured on the static site. If anyone is interested in taking on such a project, please come forward.
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13. Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that Version 090110 of the XO-LiveCD is available for download from:
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=== Tech Talk ===
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ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso
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This release is still based on the stable 8.2 build:
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http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/8.2/build767/devel_ext3/
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but has significant improvements for the Live-System runtime environment:
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* A new Content/ directory tree improves the selection of activities, content collections and language packs as well as selection of additional RPM packages
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* There is a new pre-configured home/olpc directory tree packed as squashfs-image. The current version contains more than 50 activities.
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* Improved hardware detection and additional boot options especially to get more graphic cards working
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* Updated documentation, the topics "how to create a bootable USB Pen" and "how to install the Live-System on hard disc" have been improved
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Further information is available in the PDF document:
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ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.pdf
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For discussion and feedback Wolfgang invites you to join the mailing list:
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http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd
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Kurt Gramlich reports that if Wolfgang's server is overloaded, you will find a copy of the LiveCD here:
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http://www.skolelinux.de/download/XOLiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso
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14. Hilaire Fernandes announced an alpha bundle of www.iStoa.net for Sugar. (iSTOA.net is a research project to build a platform for interactive teaching and monitoring the Internet. It is free and cross-licensed MIT.) There are about 40 "etayages" (a type of scaffolding) and all in all more than 150 exercises.
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There are some Activity updates to report:
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The bundle can be downloaded directly from:
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* TurtleArt-27.xo
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http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/14090/iStoa.net-8.12-alpha1.xo
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* Yay!BeeSee-2.xo
      
=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
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Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-Dec-27-2009-Jan-2-som.jpg|SOM]]).
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15. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-January-3-9-som.jpg
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|SOM]]).
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Gary has also made some significant changes to the text-metric extraction code; he is trying to fully normalize the frequency of each term. He hypothesizes that this will allow the maps to more clearly show the finer details that are otherwise drowned out by heavy terms like "Sugar", "Work", "Use", "Project", "Want", etc. He'll be posting some examples in the wiki.
      
=== Community News archive ===
 
=== Community News archive ===
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