Vision proposal 2016

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!

---

Sugar is high-quality software for learning, especially by younger children.

Sugar is designed for use by people who do not yet have regular or reliable internet access.

The Sugar Desktop runs on inexpensive desktop and laptop computers that have modest capacity; a web-based version is under development for tablets and phones called Sugarizer.

Sugar Activities are applications that run in the Sugar Desktop or Sugarizer. 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.

We are Sugar Labs, a volunteer-led and non-profit project established in 2009 in service to the Sugar community.

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

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 them to access laptops, travel, and more.

We make things to think with. Join us.

---

Our 2016 goals include:

Software:

• to successfully complete our six GSoC projects;
• to make two releases of Sugar, one in February (0.108) and one in October (0.110);
  • to package 0.110 for Fedora and Debian;
  • to check all activities on github work with the 0.110 release, and ensure their activity.info file is current;
  • to make a release video, similar to the release video for 0.106;
• to allow Sugar Activities to run outside Sugar;
  • on GNOME/KDE/XFCE and other free desktops;
  • on ChromeOS (with Crouton);
  • on Windows;
  • on Mac OS X;
• to port more Activities to Sugarizer, the web-based version of Sugar;
• to localize the activities/games that were produced in collaboration with the children of the Seed-Programmers Workshop+SugarCamp in Chía (La ciudad de la luna ;) Colombia in 2014;
• to 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;
• to make Sugarizer self-translatable, and via sugar-web thus make sugar desktop self-translatable;
• to complete the documentation of the Sugar toolkit;
• to consolidate all active development to Github;
  • to transfer the repositories of all of the core Sugar activities to github.com/sugarlabs, and set Gitorious read-only;
  • to transfer the issue tracking from bugs.sugarlabs.org to github.com/sugarlabs, and set Trac read-only;
  • to transfer the development discussions from sugar-devel to the issue tracker, and set the list read-only;
• to measure Sugar against the LF CII Best Practices (www-sugarlabs#47);
• Improve ASLO (which is by far the most important web service of Sugar Labs according to http://stats.sugarlabs.org/);
  • link from each ASLO entry for an activity to its github repo;
• to ensure all Sugar Labs services are running the latest versions;
• change the UI font to noto;

Organization:

• to fully staff all boards, offices, and committees;
• to make 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;
• to make a release event for the 0.110 release;
  • to track the event with https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/streetcrm;
  • to hold a "new contributor day" event, at which the experienced contributors meet with the newcomers and, together, work through the new-contributor documentation that the experienced folks themselves have written. That lets the two communities work together, and it lets the experienced coders see firsthand what struggles the new contributors encounter—including, notably, where the new-contributor documentation is falling short. Having "onboarding" documentation was important, and equally important is to encourage bug reports and patches to that documentation from new contributors as they work through it (edited from lwn);
  • to screen the "Web" documentary (as OLPC SF Summit 2015 did, reference);
• to find and develop as a reference a new laptop for kids with;
  • required attributes
    • 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)
    • zero proprietary software (in bios, firmware, drivers, soundcard, wifi, graphics card, etc) such that it becomes FSF endorsed;
  • desirable attributes
    • rugged casing
    • low power consumption
    • sunlight-readable screen (as found in the XO and nowhere else)
• to offer github.com/sugarlabs organization membership as a 'badge of honor' similar to the old certificates;
• to clean up all Sugar Labs websites, starting with the wiki and issue tracker;
  • to provide 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;
  • to find out and document on the site why past deployments moved away from Sugar Desktop;
  • to find out and document on the site why potential deployments did not choose to adopt Sugar Desktop (reference);
  • to show the finances on the website. https://github.com/NYCComptroller/Checkbook might be relevant, and also https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/anvil which wraps ledger-cli which Conservancy uses at the moment. (Conservancy also started a replacement - http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/ - but per this discussion it has stalled out.
• to successfully apply for Sugar to be listed in https://education.github.com/pack;
• to liberate the Learning To Change The World text;
  • to write a new and more detailed history of Sugar (reference);
• to raise funds
  • to develop a 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;
  • to develop an affiliate members list, and a sponsors list (similar to https://opensource.org/node/816);
  • to find out of US DoE funding for Open Education is available (reference);
  • to successfully apply to Y Combinator (reference);
• to run a joyful election for the 2017 board;
  • to deploy a SL instance of the https://dem.tools Elections app (https://github.com/nditech/elections) or https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/openstv, or if our own voting tool is not ready in time, use http://civs.cs.cornell.edu again (reference) ;
• to run a local labs 2016 survey (see Marketing_Team/Local_Labs_Survey_2016);
• to host the http://turtleartday.org website;
• [your goal here]