Sugar Labs
Welcome to the Sugar Community
This is the place to find out what is happening at Sugar Labs. Learn what tasks need to be done, what teams there are to join, and share news about recent events or current activities taking place at Sugar Labs.
Whether you're an experienced teacher, developer, or end user just getting started with Sugar, there are many ways for you to participate in the Sugar community. Whatever you do, take a few minutes to discuss Sugar with other users and become an active member of the Sugar community.
Teams
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When Sugar Labs was very large, we found it convenient and effective to divide into teams. This page listed the teams.
Teams at Sugar Labs provided general services in their subject areas across the spectrum of projects. Team members were active in multiple areas. See Category:Team.
Educational
Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community.
Education Team
The mission of the education team is to explain why Sugar is an ideal platform for learning, and to provide guidance and feedback to those who are working on how Sugar enhances learning.
Deployment Team
The mission of the Deployment Team is to voice the needs of Sugar deployments to the Sugar community, to find ways to support those needs, to organize forums for the exchange of experiences between Sugar users and Sugar developers, and to build local Sugar Labs organizations worldwide.
Technical
Learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.”
Development Team
The mission of the Development Team is to build and maintain the core Sugar environment. This includes specifying and implementing new features in conjunction with the Design Team, fixing bugs as they are found by the Testing team and the Sugar community, and generally making Sugar awesome in all ways.
None
The Development Team always needs help with fixing bugs and writing cool new activities.
Design Team
The mission of the Design Team was to make Sugar beautiful, elegant, and highly functional for our target users.
The Design Team needed help reviewing the roadmap for Sugar 9.1.
Activity Team
The Activity Team develops and maintains many of the activities available for Sugar. We also encourage independent developers to write activities, and we support them in their efforts. Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.
Our responsibilities
- Develop and maintain the ecosystem of Sugar activities.
- Recruit and mentor activity developers from the community.
- Collect, document and organize new activity and activity feature ideas from the Education Team, deployments and community.
- Work with the Development Team and the Infrastructure Team to ensure activity developers are well supported.
- Gather feedback with the Deployment Team about how Sugar activities are doing in the field.
The Activity Team was always looking for new members.
BugSquad
The mission of the BugSquad is to be responsive to incoming bug reports. The Squad needs to triage the bugs and work towards a solution with the reporters and the developers until the issue is solved. Therefore it has an important role in making the end product better and can be seen as the liaison between testers/users and developers.
Documentation Team
The mission of the Documentation team is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including learners' manuals, programming references, and tutorials.
open position
Wiki Team
The mission of the Wiki team is to maintain the Sugar Labs wiki, and to help the Sugar Labs teams and the greater educational community to collaborate effectively.
The Wiki team needed talented wiki gardeners to take loving care of overgrown wiki pages.
Translation Team
Enable users and developers to use Sugar and Sugar Labs services regardless of their native tongue. The following users perform administrative functions on the Pootle server. These are related to setting up languages for the first time, adding software projects to languages, and so forth. The best way to reach them is to post a request on the localization list.
Active:
Emeritus:
The Translation Team can always use more translators.
Infrastructure Team
Maintain and develop the collaboration and web-presence infrastructure of Sugar Labs.
The Infrastructure team can always use smart sysadmins.
Community
Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise.
Marketing Team
The mission of the Marketing team is to articulate the benefits of Sugar (simplify), to promote these benefits as widely as possible (amplify), and to recruit volunteers to improve the Sugar experience.
The Marketing team needed wordsmiths to refine the Sugar message, mavens to spread that message, and translators to broaden that message.
Oversight Board
The mission of the oversight board is to ensure that the Sugar Labs community has clarity of purpose and the means to collaborate in achieving its goals. (See Sugar_Labs/Governance)
Calendar
Events
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
Get Help
- DocumentationTeam - Look for help in the documentation.
- WikiTeam - Browse the wiki.
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.
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.