Collaboration

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 when everything works.

But sometimes there are problems.

Technologists

(School/Camp IT person, Tech Savvy Teacher, and others)

There are two routes for collaboration.

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.
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, go to 'My Settings' -> Network and put in the name of the server you want to use.

Local Collaboration on a Wired Network

To turn on local collaboration go to 'My Settings' -> Network and remove the server name. A blank setting will enable local collaboration.

In many situations, computers in the same computer lab will automatically find each other.

Bug #1113 is an example of a situation where this didn't work. Can we give people some guidance on how to make local collaboration work?

Poet's 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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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.

Testing

Mokurai is organizing tests of collaboration functions in Sugar on a Stick. We will use the Chat and IRC Activities to coordinate, and will find or create a suitable mailing list. Topics for testing include discoverability, sharing, coordinating work, use cases, workflows, and lesson plans. We would like to add this as a chapter in the ClassActs booksprint at Floss Manuals.