Sugar Labs

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=== Sugar Digest ===
=== Sugar Digest ===


1. The car allowance rebate system (CARS), more commonly known as the “Cash for Clunkers” program, was used to bail out the US auto industry. People who had purchased gas guzzlers were rewarded with $4500 towards the purchase of a more fuel-efficient car.  Of course there was no subsidy for those of us who commute by bicycle—I could use some new panniers.


Maybe it is time to bail out the US education industry. When will the US government announce the "Sugar for Clunkers"? It would work a bit differently than the car program in that with Sugar, there is no need to subsidize the purchase of replacement hardware—we'll have to find another program to bail out the computer industry. Simply replace the clunker software that most schools are using—Windows 2000 or Windows XP—with Sugar.  Sugar is, of course, free—as in speech and as in beer. Any government subsidy could go towards teacher workshops. “Yes we can!”
1. During yesterday's developer meeting on IRC we spontaeously declared that Aleksey Lim (alsroot) is Sugar Labs "Volunteer of the Month". Some quotes from Aleksey's peers: "Now that we have alsroot fixing bugs, maybe we don't need any other people"; "We passed a tipping point a few days back when alsroot was fixing faster than I was able to report them." Many kudos to Aleksey!!


2. I had the opportunity to present Sugar to HRH Princess Ubolratana Mahidol at an MIT Symposium, “Miracle of Life”, which focused on her youth development program in Thailand. John (J5) Palmieri and I demoed Sugar on a Stick to the princess (See  [http://picasaweb.google.com/somponnat/MiracleOfLifeSymposium?authkey=Gv1sRgCLib8uPkpqzjoAE&feat=email#5377118272203559266 photos from the event]). We had an animated discussion and I will be following up with Khun Paron, a leading pedagogist in Thailand regarding next steps.
2. There has been a great deal of negative press about One Laptop per Child of late--much of it based on misinformation and poor fact-checking. I decided to respond to one [http://www.undispatch.com/node/8859 blog], a particularly disheartening one by Alanna Shaikh on a UN Foundation-sponsored site:


===Help wanted/help offered===
:I am writing in response to Alanna Shaikh's 9/9/09 article, "One
Laptop Per Child - The Dream is Over".


3. Today is Fedora Testing Day. Sebastian Dziallas is leading an effort to test the latest Sugar on a Stick beta (based on Fedora 12).  Please join us in #fedora-test-day on irc.freenode.net. See [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-03_SoaS Fedora Test Day] for details.
:Not only is the dream not over, the OLPC project has created an
opportunity for the pursuit of more dreams by many more people.


4. Caroline Meeks has found a volunteer in NYC who has offered to help us make videos for Sugar Labs. Is there someone who could help him get up to speed on Sugar?
:I was Nicholas Negroponte's partner in founding One Laptop per Child.
As Nicholas has elegantly stated in his response to Ms. Shaikh's blog,
we spawned the netbook market, which is bringing the price of
computing within reach of millions more people. In addition, we launch
a free software initiative, Sugar Labs, that is putting educational
software into the hands of children.


===In the community===
:Sugar Labs (www.sugarlabs.org) is an independent outgrowth of OLPC.
We are a global community of volunteers—teachers and software
developers—whose mission is to bring the advantages of the Sugar
learning platform to children everywhere, on any computer. Sugar was
designed specially for children and offers a better alternative for
young learners than traditional “office-desktop” software. Indeed,
nothing in our children's future has anything to do with office work
from 30 years ago.


5. Simon Schampijer has posted notes about his Sugar pilot in Berlin. See [http://erikos.sweettimez.de/ his blog] or read about it in the Sugar Labs planet.  
:Ms. Shaikh is mistaken in her assertion that OLPC has abandoned  “the
special child-friendly OS.” More than 99% of the OLPC laptops in the
hands of children run Sugar. Governments prefer Sugar because of its
superior quality, openness, built-in collaboration, easy
internationalization and localization to indigenous languages, and
unbeatable price (free).
 
:Sugar on a Stick, our latest initiative, allows children fortunate
enough to have access to a computer at school, in the community, at
home (or only the occasional access to a computer in an Internet café)
to benefit from Sugar with a simple USB stick, which costs less than
US $5. Sugar on a Stick runs on netbooks, but it also runs on
hand-me-down computers, typical of those found in schools, that can
only limp along running Windows.
 
:We invite you to contact as we will be pleased to answer any of your
questions about Sugar, the free learning platform used in schools
every day in countries around the world.
 
 
3. We will be holding the Oversight Board election this month. Details to follow soon.
 
 
=== Help wanted ===
 
 
 
4. Simon Schampijer (erikos), the Sugar Release Manager, has put out a request for help with our pending 0.86 release. We are looking for someone to lead a triaging crew. Duties would include: organizing daily—or every second day—meetings for triaging bugs with the Bug Squad. It mainly involes being responsive to incoming bugs. Read more about the [[BugSquad|Bug Squad]] in the wiki. Simon is happy to answer any questions.
 
Simon is also looking for help with testing. We need testing plans for each new [[0.86/Feature_List feature]] that landed in 0.86. We are looking for someone or a group of people to arrange the testing plans (many of which are contained in Trac tickete) on a wiki page so that testers can test them.
 
Once we have the 0.86 packages in the distributions, we will announce it on the mailing list. You are welcome to report bugs you find in [http://dev.sugarlabs.org our bug tracker]. Of course we welcome any efforts to form testing teams and/or to arrange for testing days. Please use the mailing list to coordinate those efforts, so that as many people as possible can join in the fun.
 
 
=== In the community ===
 
5. The Uruguay National Public Education Administration Council of Early Childhood Education and Primary Public Relations announced a [http://www.uruguaypiensa.org.uy contest], "Uruguay of Ideas" directed towards school students and teachers to blogs about ideas for Plan Ceibal, the Uruguay OLPC/Sugar deployment.
 
 
6. There will be a Sugar/OLPC meeting in Buenos Aires on Saturday, 26 September. It will be held at the headquarters of the American Open University, Montes de Oca 745 from 9:00 to 13:00.


6. Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero reports that there is documentation about the Sugar pilots in Colombia at http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_con_fedora11_sobre_un_desktop and http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_con_fedora11_sobre_el_classmate.


===Tech Talk===
===Tech Talk===


7. As mentioned above, we are testing the Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta Release, based on the Fedora 12 Alpha as well as the latest Sugar 0.85.3 release. Please download and test your version of this release from here:


http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-beta.iso


8. Tomeu Vizoso has pushed new Sugar Base and Sugar Toolkit releases with many of the fixes and features we expect to land in 0.86. Please help us with testing.
7. Bill Bogstad has been working on a floppy boot disk for Sugar on a Stick. See http://people.sugarlabs.org/~bogstad/floppy/ for more details.
 
8. Simon and the release team continue to make great progress towards the release of Sugar 0.86. Some of the new features—e.g., the new toolbars—are brilliant. 0.86 will be a great step forward for Sugar.


===Sugar Labs===
===Sugar Labs===


9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-August-22-28-som.jpg|SOM]]).
9. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-Aug-29-Sept-4-som.jpg|SOM]]).  


=== Community News archive ===
=== Community News archive ===
Retrieved from "https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events"