Sugar Labs
Sugar Labs: a software-development and learning community
The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs”, which is in the process of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy (a non-profit foundation to produce and distribute and support the use of free software) serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.
Technical Goals
Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on “activities” rather than “applications.” The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:
- To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.
- To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be “simple” to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.
- To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and example code that uses these APIs.
- To make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.
Education Goals
Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:
- To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere;
- To explore and share best practices
- To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning
- To provide mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results.
Community Goals
Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:
- To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support.
- To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
- To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation.
- To provide integration and customization services.
Principles
In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to the principles described here, which are the author's own translation of an original text in Spanish.
Identity
- Clear mission – Full disclosed objectives.
- Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
- Explicit connections outside – Relationships with other organizations listed.
Structure
- Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
- Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
- Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
- Activities described – All the ongoing work is acknowledged.
Operation
- Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
- Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on own skills and contributors’ support.
- Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.
Information
- Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
- Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
- Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who can access them.
Goods
- Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed. (Please see/contribute to the discussion here.)
- Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
- Public accounts – It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.
- A special thanks to our contributors.
Governance
Informed by the above principles, Sugar Labs has a governance model.