Sugar Labs/Communication channels
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Sugar has a growing community that is ready to help you. Because users and contributors span the globe, a key element to the project is communication. Mailing lists, forums, blogs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Jabber, email, and this wiki provide quick and easy ways to communicate.
Mailing Lists
to see all the Sugar Labs mailing lists. After registering your email address with the mailing list, you will receive the discussion posts or digests of the posts made to the list server. Each list maintains an archive of all its posts. A link to the archive is available on each list's info page. For example, here is a link to the Community news archive.
- You may respond to a post in the archive by clicking the author's email address (at the top of the posting). This will invoke the mailto: link to the list's address with the post's subject line and message identifiers to place your post properly in the thread.
See also the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) mailing lists and archives at lists.laptop.org.
General Lists
It's an Education Project (IAEP) | Our main mailing list for discussions of Education and Sugar (See a graphic Self Organising Map for an overview of the past weeks' discussions on the list.) |
Marketing | Where we discuss marketing and outreach for the Sugar Learning Platform and its parent organization, Sugar Labs |
Community News | The Sugar community news weekly digest |
Regional Lists | |
Colombia | Sugar Labs Colombia discussion |
olpc-Sur | A list frequented by teachers using the Sugar platform in Latin America |
Project Lists | |
Dextrose | Deployments' XO operating system |
Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) | Development of live Sugar distributions |
Summer of Code | A list to support the Google Summer of Code open source development project |
Fourth Grade Math | A list supporting the development of activities for the Math4 Project |
School Server | A list for discussions on the School Server, XS (XO school Server) |
Developer Lists | |
Sugar-devel | The Sugar and Activity developers' email list (See the graphic Self Organising Map archive for an overview of past months' discussions.) |
Bugs | E-mail feed from the Sugar Labs bug tracking system |
Sugar-Desarrollo | A Spanish language Sugar developers' mailing list |
olpc | The Fedora-OLPC Project for OLPC XO operating systems that include a Sugar distribution |
devel | The OLPC system hardware and software developers' email list |
Systems Infrastructure | |
Systems | A list for those supporting the Sugar Labs systems infrastructure |
Starting a new list
The best way to start a new mailing list is to begin a discussion on a current list that's related to the topic. Once the discussion becomes active, ask for a separate list for that topic.
When a critical mass of people are regularly discussing the same topic, email the following information to the IAEP list:
- The name for the new mailing list, with alternative names in case the first one is taken
- A description of the list, its purpose, and why it's needed (being able to say "we've been talking on this other list for a while, and the discussion has grown too big, see these archive links" is helpful)
- The name/email of the list administrator, and of at least one other moderator (minimum, one admin and one moderator)
- At least 10 names/email addresses of people who want to be the initial subscribers
IRC, Internet Relay Chat
Sugar Labs no longer uses IRC as the primary mode of communication. Matrix is the preferred mode of communication. Nevertheless, the matrix and IRC channels are bridged using Matrix Appservice IRC. IRC channel only exists for backward compatibility.
- The IRC activity allows access to IRC from within the Sugar environment.
- You can use a computer-based client to log in to IRC, such as Pidgin or X-Chat. This link should work for such clients: irc://irc.libera.chat#sugar
- Or, use a browser add-on, such as CIRC (for Chrome). Current versions of Firefox are no longer compatible with add-ons, so ChatZilla will only work if you are using a sufficiently older version of Firefox.
IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion 'channels', but allows for personal chat and data transfer as well.
Sugar Labs is moving sugar channels from Freenode.net to Libera.chat.
The Sugar Labs Community uses a series of channels in the irc.libera.chat network.
IRC channel discussion archives
- Archives of many Sugar-related IRC channels are generated automatically by an IRC bot and are indexed here.
irc.freenode.net channels
General: | |
#sugar or irc://irc.libera.chat#sugar | For day-to-day Sugar development—a casual, friendly place where Sugar developers collaborate. |
#sugar-meeting or irc://irc.libera.chat#sugar-meeting | A channel for scheduled Sugar Labs meetings. See the Sugar Labs event calendar. (not active, Meetings now happen on Matrix |
#fedora-olpc or irc://irc.freenode.net#fedora-olpc | A channel for the Fedora development project for OLPC XOs and a Sugar distribution. See the project page. |
irc.oftc.net channels
General: | |
#schoolserver or irc://irc.oftc.net#schoolserver | The meeting channel for the XS, the XO school Server. (Not active in September 2009.) |
#treehouse or irc://irc.oftc.net#treehouse | The meeting channel for the Treehouse - Hosting |
- See also OLPC:Communication channels.
How to use IRC channels
- A web-based chat for other channels is Mibbit, with nickname: (whatever you like), server: irc.oftc.net, and channel: #schoolserver (or whatever other channel you're trying to get into). It also includes an in-line translation service that is helpful when other languages are used.
- Some helpful resources are here, and this tutorial, which also includes basic commands.
- Learn about IRC etiquette. Try here, here, or here.
- For IRC under sugar, install the latest Sugar IRC activity.
- In Pidgin you can configure IRC and then Add a Chat to your Buddy list. Select the IRC channel from the drop-down menu, and enter the name of the channel. You can set Pidgin to open channels automatically whenever it starts up.
- In a traditional IRC client, you join a channel with the /join command, for example, enter
/join #sugar
in the input box. - Connect to one of the above channels, and say hello. You will see a list of the handles (on-line names) of the people in the channel, and the conversation will appear in a scrolling window. Type your message in the command entry area, and press return.
- Instructions for using the meeting log robot are here.
Blogs
If you have a blog or blog post to highlight, see Blogs/Reviews.
Blog aggregators
- Planet Sugar Labs
- Planet Sugar is a collection of personal blogs by Sugar Labs contributors
- Contact mailto:planetmaster@sugarlabs-nospam.org for adding more blogs to this feed.
- Planet Sugar is a collection of personal blogs by Sugar Labs contributors
- Planet OLPC
- See OLPC:Blogs
These collect posts from a number of popular blogs on Sugar and OLPC.
Sugar Comets
Blogs that might join the "planets"
some random teacher and deployment blogs related to Sugar
- http://xo-cesaraguero.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://formando-artistas.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://miguela-xo.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://aprendiendodelaxo.blogspot.com/
- http://xomimundo.blogspot.com/2010/08/bicentenario-del-paraguay.html - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://www.ceibalflorida.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://www.recursoscompartidos38.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://bloguentarios.blogspot.com/ - Live Bookmarks feed
- http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/ - Small deployment of XOs in India
Sugar microblogs
- http://somosazucar.status.net/ - Somos Azucar community microblog
Press
Searches
Possible tools for a new community site
- See notes from #sugar-meeting 02 February 2011
- Ask Questions Format
- http://shapado.com/plans
- Lifestream is a plugin built on top of the WordPress platform. It allows you to effortlessly integrate your social network activity across the web with your blog.Out of the box, Lifestream is just streams in RSS/Atom feeds and prettying them up, but deep down it's a very flexible platform allowing developers to integrate any kind of activity they desire.
- As an enterprise knowledge worker using Eureka Streams, you can build a personal profile and activity stream. Use your profile to share information about your skills and background, and your stream to post messages and links related to work.
- Group streams provide teams and communities with the ability to generate conversation around events that are critical to their performance or objective. By capturing these events in the stream, team and community members can use a keyword search to quickly access information and make informed decisions.
- The activity page and the start page provide knowledge workers with a simple, yet powerful, set of capabilities used to view and manage the information within Eureka Streams to make more effective decisions. On your activity page, you can view all employee and group streams you are following and easily group and filter your streams to fit your work style.
- The start page is your own personal homepage. You can customize it with apps that display streams of activity or news feeds from both external and internal sources.
- Planet is an awesome 'river of news' feed reader. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first.
- reposted to http://twitter.com/fedora
- This is the official feed for the Fedora Project, a global free software community sponsored by Red Hat.
- RSS 2.0 Feed
- Facebook is perhaps somewhat controversial, but...
- There is a Facebook group page for Sugar [1] that could use some love.
- Dailymotion is a place where we had been accumulating Sugar videos (in part because they accept .ogv).
- Not sure we ever properly set up our channel but see [2].
Forums
Support Forums
- forum.laptop.org - The official OLPC community support forum.
- Total posts: 10678 • Total topics: 2292 • Total members: 5961 • 02 February 2011
- Former sites—these have a short history of problems, but are no longer preferred by Sugar Labs.
General Discussion
- OLPC News Forums - A popular forum site.
- Total posts: 31241 • Total topics: 3766 • Total members: 2507 • 02 February 2011
Jabber Networks
While the OLPC XO-1 is designed with mesh wireless networking built in (where users can connect to each other without having a central wireless internet router/connection), Sugar users around the world may not be able to connect with others using the platform unless it's through the Internet, since mesh networking relies on a concentration of users (for example, in a classroom, school or business environment).
Jabber networks link Sugar users to each other in order to chat, interact and collaborate. There are global Sugar Jabber networks, or regional ones hosted by organizations and individuals around the world. You can choose whichever Jabber network you wish to connect to. Connecting Sugar to one of these networks will greatly enhance your Sugar experience.
Video
- We have a Sugar Labs channel at Dailymotion.
- Dailymotion also has an OLPC-compatible portal at olpc.dailymotion.com with videos encoded with the free OGG Theora/Vorbis codecs, and they have OLPC-relevant content.
- OLPC TV is dedicated to collecting videos related to OLPC. The site needs help recoding videos to play in Gnash, the Free Flash viewer.
- Video Using Sugar and Video Testing Sugar have links to other videos as well.
Sugar Labs contacts
Sugar Labs has an Oversight Board. The executive director is Walter Bender (walter AT sugarlabs DOT org).
We also have an ombudsman who will help mediate any disputes (ombudsman AT sugarlabs DOT org).
Journalists can call +1.857.254.1100 or e-mail Sugar Labs Public Relations (pr AT sugarlabs DOT org).
See Sugar Labs/Contacts and our community contacts index for additional contacts.
You also may contact us by mail:
- Walter Bender
- Executive Director
- c/o Software Freedom Conservancy
- 1995 BROADWAY FL 17
- NEW YORK NY 10023-5882 USA