Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs/Current Events: Difference between revisions

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


1. Award-winning: We can start referring to Sugar as "award-winning software." It earned a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08 and was undoubtedly one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 laptop won the gold medal (Please see [http://www.idsa.org/IDEA_Awards/gallery/2008/award_details.asp?ID=772 IDEA_Awards]).
1. "The vision thing": There has been some discussion about the Sugar vision in regard to both its clarity and the degree to which it is being promoted (Please see [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-August/001425.html the email thread]). While there is some divergence of opinion about the breadth of the Sugar Labs mission—ranging from a strict focus on collaboration tools to a broad focus on everything necessary for successful one-laptop-per-child deployments—there was consensus that we are getting the message out that Sugar is alive and kicking; there is still a wide-spread impression that the FOSS community has abandoned Sugar because OLPC is working with Microsoft on Windows XP. We need to let the world know that: (a) there is a vibrant Sugar community; (b) that OLPC is still behind Sugar; (c) other hardware vendors are beginning to adopt Sugar; and (d) the FOSS Sugar learning platform offers encourages the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, graphics, etc.—they are able to engage in debugging both their personal expression and the very tools that they use for that expression.


2. Outreach: Dave Farning has been developing a road map for outreach to various communities (apparently we already have the attention of the design community; maybe our next award will be from the education community). Specifically, he suggests that we:
2. Try Sugar: An important aspect of Sugar outreach is easy access to Sugar itself. We are targeting grassroots adoption (in addition to top-down "sales" coupled to programs like One Laptop per Child or Intel regional or national initialives), so we need to make it easier for small groups to try Sugar. This includes community support of the existing LiveUSB, LiveCD, and Appliance efforts, but also further consideration (and documentation) of the various hardware one might find in the field and more detailed instructions on setting up classrooms (groups) of machines working together. Towards that end, we are beginning work on a "Try Sugar" section in the wiki (Please help us flesh out [[Documentation/Try_Sugar]]), which includes a matrix of "tried and ready" solutions from the field. To be able to say to a teacher, here is a step-by-step guide to how you can repurpose (or overlay) the computers you have access to in the classroom to run Sugar will go a long way towards fostering growth of Sugar.


* Engage the package maintainers for the various Linux distributions
3. "Unexpected" suggestions: Michael Stone wrote up some suggestions regarding "the Work of Sugar", his reactions to sugar's architecture, design, and implementation. It was the basis of an in-depth discussion the Sugar mailing list (Please see [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007304.html]).
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Help build a community within each distribution to packages Sugar and Sugar Activities;
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.


* Engage education-focused distributions
4. Proposal: There has been a back-and-forth discussion about establishing an Activity developers mailing list separate from the Sugar developers mailing list (Please see [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007503.html]). It has been suggested that Activity developers need a more focused list to alert them to needs specific to activity developers, such as changes to APIs, a forum for soliciting help, etc. The downside of course is the fragmentation and distraction of yet another mailing list.
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Make sure they are aware of the Sugar packaging efforts (either .deb or .rpm);
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.


* Engage the education community
5. Outreach: Stormy Peters, executive director, GNOME Foundation, has blogged about Sugar Labs (Please see [http://www.stormyscorner.com/2008/07/sugar-the-softw.html Stormy's Corner]) and has pledged to step up the level of awareness of Sugar within the GNOME community. (Sugar has its foundation in the GNOME toolkit.) Morgan Collett has been actively promoting Sugar within the Ubuntu community and Greg DeKoeningsberg has been very helpful in promoting Sugar within the Fedora community.
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators;
** Help expand the community to include development of pedagogy; models of use; etc.


Dave reports our progress to date:
6. Minutes: We had a meeting of the acting Sugar oversight board on Friday, 8 August 2008. Minutes and a log of the conversation are in the wiki (Please see [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_1_August_2008_-_14.00_.28UTC.29|1 August 2008 minutes]]). One important decision reached at the meeting was to open up nominations for postions on the to-be-elected seven-member board over the first two weeks of August (until the 16th) and to hold an election over the final two weeks of August (from the 17th to the 30th). Please send nominations to "walter AT sugarlabs.org"; feel free to nominate yourself.
 
* We are working with Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu and are working towards a basic set of stable packages for their distributions;
* We are in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with eduction distributions (Please help us);
* Outside of the OLPC deployments, we are still in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with education communities (Again, your help is needed here--we want to establish a "bottom-up" approach to compliment the OLPC top-down efforts).
 
3. "Congratulations! but Sugar sucks": As we near code freeze for Sucrose 8.2, Ben Schwartz has identified six areas in need of improvement. In a thread with a somewhat unfortunate subject field, these are discussed as candidate areas we should focus on for the next release (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html). The discussion begs the question of how Sugar Labs can rise above day-to-day deployment headaches in order to ensure that there is a solid foundation being built. A model I have been advocating for Sugar Labs is as the place where the goals and architecture for Sugar are established. The community, of course, vets those goals, critiques the architecture, and provides the means of achieving those goals.
 
4. "Kid contributions": John Gilmore started a discussion bemoaning the fact that as far as we know, there have not yet been any patches to Sugar submitted by a child (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007349.html). My response to John was:
* we need better tools for software development on the XO (Jameson Chema Quinn has been making some progress on the Develop activity—see below);
* while the children have not yet been making modification to the Sugar codebase, there is evidence of a cultural shift in schools using Sugar that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start.
 
5. OEMs: Are we ready to start contacting OEMs? (There are a number of new products being announced in the low-cost laptop space. How do we ensure that Sugar is an option for these products?)  
 
6. Physics: Edward Cherlin has proposed we "start a physics textbook project combining Measure, Etoys, SciPy, and all of the low-cost instruments we can come up with" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007269.html).


=== Community jams and meetups ===
=== Community jams and meetups ===
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