User:Ndoiron/2011-2012 candidacy

To everyone in the Sugar and OLPC community:

My interest in Sugar began when I received a G1G1 XO laptop. From my dorm room at Carnegie Mellon, I started fixing bugs and then hacking new features for GeoQuiz, SocialCalc, and the Map activity. In 2010-2011, I worked for two months each with the Kasiisi Project in Uganda and Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, and I am presently halfway through a two-month deployment in Haiti (as of October 20, 2011). I have helped represent our community at Maker Faire NYC, OpenStreetMap's 2011 conference, and the State Department's Tech@State. If you have visited http://olpcMAP.net, a website I co-founded, or have read a post from my blogs, MapaDelSur and MapUganda, I hope that it made you feel better connected to the teachers and students using Sugar around the world.

I would appreciate your support for my next phase of volunteering with Sugar: serving on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.

I believe that my experiences teaching Sugar in Uganda and Haiti, and my development work with Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, would help me provide valuable input to the board's decisions. As a 2012 Code for America fellow ( http://codeforamerica.org/2011/10/13/meet-code-for-america-2012/ ), I will be working closely with city governments to find open-source solutions to common problems. As I see it, Sugar Labs is a major player in the development of open education, but should take further steps to cover traditional math and science disciplines. My recent work on Memorize with Sensors, Mapa Ceibal, and Crikey (a modified Measure activity) are my endeavors to make this possible without losing our engaging constructionist ideals.

Thank you,

Nicholas Doiron

Ecole Shalom

Croix-des-Bouquets

Haiti