Poets Guide to Collaboration

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|             Activities
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|           Presence Service
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|               D- bus
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|             Telepathy
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|         Telepathy-gabble 
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|             XMPP      
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|           Jabber Server  
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Parents and kids

Collaboration in the Sugar sense is simply helping kids play together. Kids play together all the time. They talk, they run, they throw balls back and forth. Sugar allows kids to talk and play and learn together.

Activities - Activities, in the Sugar world, are the programs and applications on which kids learn.

Neighborhood - Kids find people to play with in their neighborhood view. Who will be in my kids neighborhood?

Really, that is all you need to know:)

School/Camp IT person or accidental techie

There are two ways you can collaboration.

#  You connect up to a Jabber Server.  You can either use one on the internet or you can install your own as part of an XS server installation.  To use a Jabber server goto Your Settings -> Network and put in the name of the server you want to use.  
#  You can collaborate "locally" without a server. If you remove the name of the Jabber server from your settings, or it fails to connect for some reason, then Sugar tries to connect locally. Sugar machines will be able to collaborate if they are connected to the same wireless network or wired port.  It will not work over your entire LAN, you have to be on the same segment.

Activity Developers

Presence Service - The Presence Service is a set of APIs which allow developers to enable collaboration features on Sugar.

That is all you need to know. The rest is under the covers.

Core Sugar Developers

Telepathy - Telepathy is another set of APIs which has a 'plug-in' design so that various communication protocols can be 'plugged-in' without affecting what the user of activity developers sees.

Collaboration Developers

Telepathy-gabble - Telepathy-gabble is a plug-in backend that uses the XMPP protocol to talk to a server.

XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open, XML-based protocol originally aimed at near-real-time, extensible instant messaging (IM) and presence information. (buddy lists)

XMPP Server - At the bottom to the stack is a XMPP server. These are often referred to as jabber servers because the first popular XMPP Server was called jabberd.