Vision proposal 2016

2016-May-2 The following is a DRAFT, that will be presented to the Sugar Labs Oversight Board at a regularly scheduled monthly meeting as a motion to approve it for the year. Your edits are welcome!

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Sugar is high-quality software for learning with a special focus on the needs of younger children.

Sugar is designed for use with or without direct internet access, so it can be used by children do not yet have regular or reliable internet access.

The Sugar desktop runs on inexpensive desktop and laptop computers; a web-based version is under development for tablets and phones.

Sugar Activities are applications that run in the Sugar desktop and/or on the web. Sugar Activities encourage learning through self-discovery and encourage collaboration, expression, and reflection.

Every Sugar Activity respects every user's freedom to run, study, modify and redistribute it using software licenses compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3 or later.

Sugar development began in 2006 as part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

In 2016, the Sugar community is global; we aspire to include users and contributors in all countries, all languages, and all cultures.

We are Sugar Labs, a volunteer-led and non-profit organization in service to the Sugar community.

We facilitate knowledge and software sharing among all people; we relate the software freedom movement to education.

We raise funds and use them to accelerate the progress of our Members, enabling their access to laptops, travel, and more.

We make things to think with. Join us.

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Our 2016 goals include:

Software:

• successfully completing 6 GSoC projects;
• making 2 releases of Sugar, one in February and one in October;
• Allow running Sugar Activities outside Sugar;
• porting 5 Activities to Sugarizer, a web-based version of Sugar;
• Localize all 5 activities/games that were produced in Collaboration with the Children of the Seed-Programmers Workshop+SugarCamp in Chía (La ciudad de la luna ;) Colombia on 2014;

• Make "Sugar On A Stick" into "Sugar Local Lab On A Stick," so that sugar communities without active/direct internet connections can do more to self-support themselves, and eventually upload what they have back to the central repos;
  • Sugarizer becomes self-translatable, and via sugar-web thus make sugar desktop self-translatable;

Organization:

• fully staffing all boards, offices, and committees;

• making XO-4s—the machine we aspired to build at OLPC in 2006 is available as the XO-4 laptop—available from us pre-installed with the 2016 release of Sugar individually or in batches of 20+ with 1+ school server units, so any developer can get one conveniently and any classroom-sized group anywhere can become a Local Lab with almost "1 click" like convenience if they have $X to put down;
  • organizing a new laptop for kids with a 10" screen and larger keyboard than the XO, so adults can use it too (similar to the 10" macbook pro from around 2004, or many 10" chromebooks today) that has zero proprietary software (bios, firmware, drivers, soundcard, wifi, graphics card, etc) and is FSF endorsed

• consolidating all active development to Github;

• • Making the github org membership a 'badge of honor' similar to the old certificates;

• cleaning up all Sugar Labs websites, starting with the wiki and issue tracker;

• • Providing a step-by-step guide on the homepage website to setting up a 2016 vintage deployment device—one that can be purchased in quantities of 30+ for under $100 each—that covers where to buy them, how install Sugar on all of them at the time of deployment;

• • liberate the Learning To Change The World text;

• Setting up a membership donation programme to elevate members to "supporting" members

• • Developing an supporting members list, by making a 'super list' with as many possible members as possible, such as from Special:LastUserLogin (admins only) and mailman and Sugar_Labs/Members/List, and then making persistent attempts to contact them until they pay a membership donation, ask for a membership bursary so they don't have to pay the fee personally, or tell us to go away

• Running a joyful election for the 2017 board
  • Deploying a SL instance of the https://dem.tools Elections app (https://github.com/nditech/elections)

• [your goal here]