Sugar Network/Concept

Summary

The Sugar Network 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 Needs that Sugar Network is trying to solve.

The particular implementation is tailored by the following decisions:

• Support Internet-less environments (but not only);
• The list of provided services should cover the full circle of collaboration behaviour within the Sugar community;
• Not trying to reinvent the Internet by duplicating all services available there making them off-line.
• The list of provided services should be tough to make the Sugar Network useful also in on-line;
• Support decentralized collaboration model on social level, i.e., not only for low level technical implementation details.

Overview

The Sugar Network is all about:

• Players,
• play Roles,
• interact with Objects,
• to accomplish their Needs,
• when the regular behaviour might be described by the Workflows.

Players

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

Objects

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

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

(?):

1. generalize tracker to support Q&A workflowf
2. groups of Players (friends zoom)

Players

Attributes: Actions: Events:

Projects

Attributes:

• Type:
  • General,
  • Activity,
  • Wiki,
  • Tracker.
  • Discussion,
  • Gallery
• 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. It might provide similar functionality to Google Sites.

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.

Needs

The needs that Sugar Network is trying to solve. They might be explained by the following selection from the Fundamental human needs:

Need	Being (qualities)	Having (things)	Doing (actions)	Interacting (settings)
Understanding	critical capacity, curiosity, intuition	literature, teachers, policies, educational	analyse, study, investigate,	schools, families, 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

Identity

Each player should be able to create and manage a unique identity in the network. Every interaction of the player with the network should be accounted on the player's metrics, as eventually this may be part of the player dashboard. Each player may have an individual reputation, according to other players ratings made to his contributions.

Understanding

A player should be able to view all objects and apply the optional filters including the resource type, the visibility level, tags or the associated player/team. In this preview, we may be able to offer basic statistics of the object in order to give analytical perspective to the selection. The player should be able to select the object in order to participate in a deeper level where he should be able to explore the associated resources. As a player, I might receive events from the objects I'm subscribed to as well as personal events like invitations made by other players.

Participation

Any player might be able to comment any object, rate any contribution, edit any wiki, create any issue, attach any object to any gallery, become a follower of any object.

Creation

Any player might be able to create a new project by defining a name, the type of project and the project objective(s). A project creator may be able to invite other players to follow/contribute to his project.

Freedom

Once an object have been selected by the player, he should be able to filter any type of contributions according to its ratings.

Workflows

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

Users Interface

From users point of view, The Sugar Network is represented by several kinds views:

Browser

• A way to expose additional metadata about currently selected item.

Project home

• The top of participants
• View for particular Project resource, Wiki, Tracker, Gallery, etc.

Technical Overview

The Sugar Network consists of different types of parts:

• Client application that runs in Sugar learning environment on machines of people who take part in the Sugar 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 Sugar 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 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.
• Support coding workflow for projects.