Sugar Labs/Current Events

What's new

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at 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.)

Sugar Digest

1. The announcement of changes at One Laptop per Child (OLPC) this week dominated the discussions on the lists, IRC, and in the hallway conversations at FUDCon and XO Camp. While it came as no surprise that OLPC was going to focus its efforts on deployments, largely leaving engineering, including software development, to third parties, the abruptness of the transition and its direct impact on so many talented and dedicated people was a surprise, even within the context of global economic upheaval.

I'd like to take this opportunity to extend say thank you to the engineers who have worked so tirelessly on the project for their leadership, both those whom I had the pleasure of working with when I was at OLPC—Eben Eliason, Jim Gettys, Scott Anahain, Michael Stone, and Henry Hardy—as well as many others—those who joined OLPC after I left—whom I learned to respect through my interactions with them while wearing my Sugar Labs hat. Having spoken with many of you, I know you will remain active in the Sugar community, even as you seek new opportunities.

One of the reasons we started Sugar Labs nine months ago was that we anticipated these changes at OLPC. It was clear to many of us at the time that the Sugar learning platform could and should be made more widely available and that in order for Sugar to grow, it would have to become a community project, without extensive ties or dependencies on any single company or organization. The Sugar Labs community is expanding. The downsizing of OLPC's engineering efforts, while significant to OLPC deployments in the short term, is actually a catalyst for a needed change. It compels the deployments to be more self-sufficient and more interconnected. Indeed, one direct consequence of the events of last week is the acceleration of plans for local Sugar Labs around the world. A decentralize approach, where engineering investments in support of Sugar and learning are made locally, is one of our great strengths.

Short-term contingency plans for supporting the current OLPC deployments were discussed at FUDCon and are a topic of discussion at XO Camp. While not all of the details of how the OLPC 9.1 release will be managed, the overall direction that is being taken is one that relies more directly on the upstream Fedora community. There remains at OLPC a core engineering team that will be able to liaise with Fedora (and Sugar Labs) to make sure that an OLPC-XO-1-specific dependencies are met.

Long term, OLPC will undoubtedly directly leverage the efforts of the Sugar community as it continues down the path of integration with the various upstream GNU/Linux distributions. Having Sugar run everywhere only enhances their position.

2. Meanwhile, we've all been busy this week, using FUDCon and XO Camp as an opportunity to meet face to face with many of of colleagues. Feature freeze Sugar 0.84 is at the end of this week and we have already begun discussion about our goals for 0.86. The various Sugar Labs community teams have been active. Christian Marc Schmidt continues to make great progress on a new landing site for sugarlabs.org. Greg Dekoenigsberg is taking a lead role in the Sugar Labs Engineering Community (Caroline Meeks, David Farning, and I are reaching out to a number of potential partners to fill Greg's shoes on the Marketing Team.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

3. There are numerous posting on the FUDConF11 site regarding what we accomplished at FUDCon this past weekend.

4. You can follow along with the events of XO Camp here.

5. We are still looking for someone to represent Sugar Labs at SCALE in LA in February.

6. I will be a Sugar Labs representation at LCA next week. Mel Chua will also be traveling from Boston to Tasmania for the conference. We are looking forward to seeing our colleagues in Hobart.

7. OLPC Learning CLub DC will be holding a Family XO Mesh Meet up on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 (See [1]).

Help Wanted

8. Wade Brainerd had started a Sugar Labs Activity Team to develop and maintain the activities available for Sugar. The team encourages independent developers to write activities and will support them in those efforts.

Our goal is to ensure that Sugar provides a complete set of high-quality educational, collaborative, constructivist activities.

9. We are still seeking help in regard to copy and illustrations for the new site. One project we have in mind is a comicbook-like narrative about Sugar to be featured on the static site. Also, we'd love stories from the field—from teachers, parents, and students, about their experiences and perspectives on Sugar. It is important that we communicate our message more widely and in language that is more approachable to the non-technical community.

Tech Talk

10. .xo vs .rpm: One interesting discussion at FUDCon was in regard to the format for Sugar Activities. You can follow the discussion in detail here.

11. Tomeu Vizoso has an illustrated blog (also in the planet) about all that he has been up to in the past weeks:

  • reviewed and pushed Ryan Kabir's work on moving most of the actions from the palette of the Home View XO icon onto the Frame so that they are always accessible, regardless of which view you are in.
  • worked on the file transfer UI
  • added a utility class (util.TempFilePath) that hopefully will remove the temp file leaks we have been suffering in past releases
  • worked on removable devices in the Journal (They no longer use an index or write to the device without user action)
  • changed the Home View to display the last entries for every activity and resume by default when the icon is clicked.

12. I've released Verison 1.0 of a portfolio tool for Sugar TAPortfolio-1.xo. Preliminary documentation can be found on my user page User:Walter/TAPortfolio. TAPortfolio is a presentation Activity that lets you create multimedia slide shows from material retrieved from your Journal. The basic idea is to import objects from your Journal, along with descriptions and preview images, into slide templates, not unlike Powerpoint, and then show a presentation by stepping through them. TA Portfolio includes the typical major functions of presentation software: an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted (this is largely incomplete), a method for inserting images (from the Journal), and a slide-show system to display the content. What makes it a bit different than tools such as Powerpoint is that you can program your slides using TurtleArt blocks. TAPortfolio also has an export-to-HTML function so that presentations can be viewed outside of the Sugar environment. Feedback appreciated. (Version 2.0 should be available shortly.)

13. Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that Version 090110 of the XO-LiveCD is available for download from:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso

This release is still based on the stable 8.2 build:

http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/8.2/build767/devel_ext3/

but has significant improvements for the Live-System runtime environment:

  • A new Content/ directory tree improves the selection of activities, content collections and language packs as well as selection of additional RPM packages
  • There is a new pre-configured home/olpc directory tree packed as squashfs-image. The current version contains more than 50 activities.
  • Improved hardware detection and additional boot options especially to get more graphic cards working
  • Updated documentation, the topics "how to create a bootable USB Pen" and "how to install the Live-System on hard disc" have been improved

Further information is available in the PDF document:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.pdf

For discussion and feedback Wolfgang invites you to join the mailing list:

http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd
 

Kurt Gramlich reports that if Wolfgang's server is overloaded, you will find a copy of the LiveCD here:

http://www.skolelinux.de/download/XOLiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso


14. Hilaire Fernandes announced an alpha bundle of www.iStoa.net for Sugar. (iSTOA.net is a research project to build a platform for interactive teaching and monitoring the Internet. It is free and cross-licensed MIT.) There are about 40 "etayages" (a type of scaffolding) and all in all more than 150 exercises.

The bundle can be downloaded directly from:

http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/download.php/14090/iStoa.net-8.12-alpha1.xo

Sugar Labs

15. Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-January-3-9-som.jpg |SOM]]).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

 9 Dec 2008 Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
 15 May 2008 Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs