Sugar Labs

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Mission

The mission of Sugar Labs is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, and teach with the Sugar learning platform.

See this Community news post from 10-Mar-2009, on ...our “Big Overarching Vision Goals for 2009”...

Teams

Sugar Labs is organized around overlapping Teams. Please use the Community panel in the wiki sidebar to visit and explore the work and events for each team. This Team category page collects all Sugar Labs wiki pages with a Team tag.

Projects

Sugar Labs is supporting a few projects focused on delivering specific goals in a defined time period. Please see these project home pages:

| Summer of Code | Sugar Summer Program |

Community News

A current events page updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The Sugar Digest is also sent to the community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org list and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

An archive of Sugar Digests is available.

Events Calendar

Sugar community events are posted in a public calendar within the Google Calendar system. The calendar is available in a variety of formats: .

Please contact User:Walter if you'd like to post an event to the calendar. Or simply post it below and it will be included.

Roadmap

The Sugar community roadmap is used to guide our community efforts:

Mission, Vision, Values
Distribution
Deployments
Quality Assurance
Infrastructure

Sugar Labs: a learning and software-development community

The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs”, which is in the process of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy (a non-profit foundation to produce and distribute and support the use of free software) serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.

Education Goals

Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:

To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere;
To explore and share best practices
To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning
To provide mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results.

Technical Goals

Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on “activities” rather than “applications.” The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:

To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.
To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be “simple” to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.
To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and example code that uses these APIs.
To make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.

Community Goals

Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:

To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support.
To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation.
To provide integration and customization services.

Principles

In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to the principles described here, which are the author's own translation of an original text in Spanish.

Identity

Clear mission – Full disclosed objectives.
Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
Explicit connections outside – Relationships with other organizations listed.

Structure

Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
Activities described – All the ongoing work is acknowledged.

See Wiki Structure for a guide to how the wiki models Sugar Labs structure.

Operation

Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on own skills and contributors’ support.
Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.

Information

Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who can access them.

Goods

Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed. (Please see/contribute to the discussion here.)
Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
Public accounts – It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.
A special thanks to our contributors.

Governance

Informed by the above principles, Sugar Labs has a governance model.

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