Sugar Network/Concept

Summary

The Sugar Users Network (SUN) is an initiative to try to leverage collaborative, contributing, and learning behaviour in Sugar Learning Platform. It is started as the only possible option for connectivity-less Sugar deployments (but it is also being targeted to the Internet driven environments) and Peru in particular.

The intentions might be explained by the following selection from the Fundamental human needs with adding the SUN column to briefly describe the Sugar Users Network's approach:

Need/Satisfaction	Being (qualities)	Having (things)	Doing (actions)	Interacting (settings)	SUN (Sugar Users Network)
Understanding	critical capacity, curiosity, intuition	literature, teachers, policies, educational	analyse, study, meditate, investigate,	schools, families, universities, communities,
Participation	receptiveness, dedication, sense of humour	responsibilities, duties, work, rights	cooperate, dissent, express opinions	associations, parties, churches, neighbourhoods
Leisure	imagination, tranquillity, spontaneity	games, parties, peace of mind	day-dream, remember, relax, have fun	landscapes, intimate spaces, places to be alone
Creation	imagination, boldness, inventiveness, curiosity	abilities, skills, work, techniques	invent, build, design, work, compose, interpret	spaces for expression, workshops, audiences
Identity	sense of belonging, self-esteem, consistency	language, religions, work, customs, values, norms	get to know oneself, grow, commit oneself	places one belongs to, everyday settings
Freedom	autonomy, passion, self-esteem, open-mindedness	equal rights	dissent, choose, run risks, develop awareness	anywhere

The particular implementation is tailored by the following points:

• Support Internet-less environments (but not only);
• Support decentralized collaboration model on social level, i.e., not only for low level technical implementation details;
• Not trying to reinvent the Internet by duplicating all services available there making them off-line;
• The list of provided, within the Sugar Network, services should be tough and minimal to make it useful after going on-line and reusing various Internet services.

Overview

The Sugar Network is all about:

• Players,
• play Roles,
• interact with Objects,
• taking part in Activities.

Players

These are real people that take part in the Sugar Network.

Objects

The whole experience within the Network is about interacting with the following objects:

• Players
• Projects
  • Wiki
  • Tracker
  • Gallery
• Experience

(?):

1. comments/chat/forum
2. generalize tracker to support Q&A workflowf
3. replace Wiki w/ more structered resources, like Solutions, and use wiki pages there
4. General object vs. gallery
5. groups of Players (friends zoom)
6. reuse sugar zooms for project visibility levels
7. support coding workflow for projects

Players

Attributes: Actions: Events:

Projects

Attributes:

• Type:
  • General,
  • Activity,
  • Wiki,
  • Tracker.
  • (?) particular activity
• Visibility:
  • Everyone
  • A group of Players
  • Private

Actions: Events:

Wiki

A collection of Wiki pages that use MediaWiki markup language, wikitext. Pages might be represented by a tree of pages. There is all time the root page. The idea to have a root page is to let it possible to merge these wiki pages to the standalone MediaWiki server.

Attributes: Actions: Events:

Wiki page

Attributes:

• Visibility:
  • Everyone
  • A group of Players
  • Private

Actions: Events:

Tracker

There are two types of entries:

• Requests
• Tasks

Attributes: Actions: Events:

Requests

Attributes:

• Visibility:
  • Everyone
  • A group of Players
  • Private

Actions: Events:

Tasks

Attributes:

• Visibility:
  • Everyone
  • A group of Players
  • Private

Actions: Events:

Gallery

A collection of activity objects of types depended on Project type.

Attributes: Actions: Events:

Exhibit

Attributes:

• Visibility:
  • Everyone
  • A group of Players
  • Private

Actions: Events:

Experience

Players' experience might be represented by statistics that will be visible (maybe partially) for another Players and might be used by researchers.

Roles

These are roles, not the definition of particular people. Each person can play different roles in different time.

Activities

These are kinds of activities that Roles can take part in. The particular activity might involve several Players and several Roles.

Technical Overview

The Network consists of different types of parts:

• Client application that runs in Sugar learning environment on machines of people who take part in the Network;
• Server that runs either in the Internet (if connectivity is not a problem for clients) or on a school server (that is being synchronized with the Internet, thus, with the rest of school servers).

The Network supports Internet and Internet-less environments. In both cases, the participant's experience is the same. The only difference is the amount of time when all contributors will see the same picture, in case of the Internet, it will happen in live mode, for Internet-less cases, after synchronizing all school servers.

The particular technical implementation is tailored by the following decisions:

1. Using Web technologies to implement the front end;
2. Keep front end as a local Web application on a client side, it sounds converse regarding the #1 decision but this decision is based on #4 and #5;
3. Front end is implemented as a Falsk application using Platform_WebSDK to accomplish the #4 and #5;
4. Local Web application serve only one user and are much simpler than singular applications that are intended to serve thousands of users simultaneously;
5. Having simple and clean designed (see the previous point), it will be easy for doers to learn, change, reimplement the front end;
6. Implementation should be decentralized to support off-line workflow.

Todo

• Class type for projects to support regular class behaviour from teachers' pov.