Oversight Board/2017-2019-candidates

Election

There are to be four (4) Oversight Board slots to be elected for the 2017-2019 period, currently held by Walter, Adam, Lionel and Sameer.

Calendar

Stage I	August 15	Announcement of election date and first call for candidates.
Stage II	August 30	Reminder of election date and second call for candidates.
Stage III	September 15	Candidates' Wiki submissions deadline.
Stage IV	October 1-15	Election.

Candidates

Candidates should create a Wiki entry at Candidates' Wiki submissions, one entry per candidate, 1500 characters maximum length, sharing their vision and motivation.

Candidates should read and understand the terms of the Software Freedom Conservancy Fiscal Agreement, because such terms bind our behavior as Sugar Labs Oversight Board and all our internal policies and procedures as a Project and as an organization.

Among other terms, please note the Project Management, Communications and Activities terms in the agreement provide that:

2.1. The Oversight Board Will Manage the Project.

2.2. The Project Will Be Free Software.

6. Representation of the Project in Conservancy: The Representative will have the authority to instruct Conservancy on the Project’s behalf on all matters.

The terms contemplate that the Oversight Board elects a single individual to communicate with Conservancy (the “Representative”) and shall notify Conservancy promptly following the election of a new Representative.

By publishing your candidacy below, you imply that in case you are elected a Sugar Labs Oversight board member you will honor the agreement terms.

Devin Ulibarri

Devin Ulibarri is a musician and an educator who became interested in free/libre software in 2014 during research for the Center for Music-in-Education (Boston). Devin pursued research into the implications for "software libre in education" which led him to believe that free/libre software is best for teaching and learning. He was soon introduced to SugarLabs, which both empowers teachers/learners with software freedom as well as offers tools to exercise those freedoms in a community setting.

Since his introduction to the SugarLabs community, Devin has participated heavily in the development of Music Blocks, a programming language for music. Within the SugarLabs community, Devin offers conceptual recommendations, design ideas, mockups, testing, minor patches, and community involvement on GitHub and Sugar's IRC. In his local community, Devin has represented Music Blocks software as a workshop lecturer (Constructionism Conference in Thailand, Canopy of Somerville) as well as a class instructor (YMCA Malden).

As an oversight board member, Devin would bring his insight as an experienced classroom teacher, an artist, and a free/libre software advocate. Devin has been described as "a very patient person", which he hopes would be a contribution to the oversight board if elected.

[Walter Bender]

After ten years of working on the Sugar Learning Platform, I have been reflecting on the specific tools and affordances we have deployed to engage learners in computational thinking with the overarching goal of fluency. These tools including multiple media-rich programming environments and also mechanism for debugging, collaboration, expression, and reflection. We continue to motivate our selection of tools by revisiting the pioneering work of Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Cynthia Solomon, who first brought multimedia computing to elementary schools in the late 1960s with the goal of engaging children in the mastery of many of the heuristics and algorithms we associate with computational thinking. Free/Libre Software continues to provide scaffolding for deep and personal expression through programming and for surfacing personal responsibility, a sense of community, and unbounded expectations of Sugar users turned Sugar developers.

Where have we fallen short? Much has changed since we began Sugar development in 2006. Sugar predates smartphones and Apps, Chromebooks and Google Docs, MOOCs and on-line resources such as the Kahn Academy. Edtech is become big business: selling Apps and content is more lucrative and facile than the hard work of engaging teacher and learners in authentic problem-solving. There is a strong temptation to make things as simple as possible so as to reach the broadest possible audience. But some things are inherently complex. Apps might be fun, but the hard part of “hard fun” is in reaching towards complexity. Children should not miss out on the learning that takes place when learning to use tools. At Sugar Labs we are attempting to go where the learners are by providing as much of Sugar as we can as a Web app, on Android, or on iOS, i.e., Sugarizer. At the same time, I am encouraged by the growth of the Maker Movement and are working hard to support Sugar on platforms popular with that movement, e.g., Raspbian.

“It is said that the best way to learn something is to teach it—and perhaps writing a teaching program is better still in its insistence on forcing one to consider all possible misunderstandings and mistakes.” [Papert 1970] We have made mistakes as a community, but we are a learning community and we can and will do better. As purveyors of educational technology we have both a pedagogical and moral obligation to provide the means by which our users can maintain (and modify) our products. Enabling those closest to the learners is in the interest of everyone invested in educational technology as it both ensures viability of the product and it is a valuable source of new ideas and initiatives.

I conclude with a quote from Ezequiel Pereira, Sugar Labs Google Code-in winner and recent recipient of a Google bounty for finding a security hole: “Homework is boring. Looking for bugs is fun.” Let's continue to provide the basis of some fun.

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References

This election is being run by the Membership and Elections Committee which was appointed in January, along with Dave Crossland as an impartial election oversight party.

An update from the Membership and Elections Committee was received during the Oversight Board meeting of August 4. Also listed were the expiring slots.