Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Sugar narrative: Caroline Meeks and I participated in a readathon at the Gardner School in Allston last week, giving us an opportunity to spend some time in classrooms in the school where we are planning a Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot. We also had an opportunity to meet with a former classroom teacher who is now focusing full time on curriculum development. There was synergy between all of our goals: good things will happen. However, one thing became obvious very early in the discussion: we are lacking a good narrative about Sugar and how it is used in schools. We have lots of pictures of children with laptops, but few of these pictures are illustrative of learning. We have some data—most notably from the Peru deployment—about the impact of Sugar on learning, but again, these are data illustrating results, not the process of achieving those results. While more deployment guides and lesson plans are being written, we still lack a compelling narrative.

1. gitorious: It was time to try migrating TurtleArt, the project I am maintaining, over to git.sugarlabs.org. The new git system we are using, gitorious, has a user interface that is more "web-friendly" than any git systems I have used before. It does a good job of leading through the process of creating new projects. One of the nice things about it is that anyone can create or fork a project unilaterally, thus I think it will work well with the distributed nature of Sugar development. (So fork your favorite project (TurtleArt) in order to try out your ideas!!!) I would recommend Marco Pesenti Gritti's [[DevelopmentTeam/Git|quick guide to migrating projects]] and you may want to [[User:Walter#gitorious|learn from my mistakes]] as well.

 

2. Sugar and GNOME:

 

:BOSTON, Mass — December 22, 2008 — Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.

 

:"The resources made available by the GNOME project have been essential to the development of the Sugar learning platform", says Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs. "The Sugar community looks forward to working more closely with the GNOME Foundation on topics such as GNOME Mobile and an upstream collaboration framework." Walter Bender will be representing Sugar Labs on the GNOME Advisory Board.

 

:GNOME forms the basis of many platforms such as Sugar, Maemo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and also delivers the desktop platform offered by companies such as Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies.

Maybe it is time to dust off an old idea: Why don't we create ''a day in the life of Sugar'', a movie/telenovela/graphic novel about various experiences with Sugar in the classroom? We have loads of material—we just need to start telling the story. Anyone interested in taking the lead on this project?

:"The GNOME Foundation is excited to have Sugar Labs join the advisory board." says Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. "Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability. The interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in the future."

2. OLPC's Change the World program: It is refreshing to read that OLPC is beginning to embrace programs at a scale that can be launched at a grassroots level. Let's hope that this bottom-up approach is given a chance to get some momentum.

3. Sugar Labs™: Karen Sandler, a lawyer at the Software Freedom Conservancy, who has been helping us will all things legal has confirmed that our trademark application for the name Sugar Labs has been submitted to the USPTO (with the Conservancy, our parent organization, named as the applicant). "They indicate in our receipt that it will be 4–5 months before we are assigned an examining attorney. In the meantime the mark is a 'pending' application." Karen will start working on a trademark policy for

Sugar that we will post in the wiki.

3. Sugar Workshop plan: Rafael Ortiz posted [http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/Deployment_guide_sur/TallerBuinaima the workshop plan] from a teacher workshop that took place at the Bunaima Foundation in Bogota, Colombia.

4. Mobilis (Encore): It is summer in Brazil. Paulo Drummond was the first one to bring to my attention that Mobilis has won a bid to bring 150,000 laptops to children in Brazil. (OLPC did not participate in the bid.) As I understand it, it will be running a Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. There has already been some preliminary discussion about a Sugar port to Mandriva. Let's make it happen.

4. Local labs: We've been discussing frameworks for local/regional Sugar Labs. Please join the weekly discussion of the deployment team on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net channel #sugar-meeting. We'd appreciate more input from deployment teams around the world. There is a [[DeploymentTeam/Local_Lab_MOU|draft of a sample memorandum of understanding (MOU)]] between Sugar Labs and any organization that would like to establish a local lab. Please add your comments.

5. [http://www.dailymotion.com Dailymotion] seems to be the site where videos about learning projects are being aggregated. Sebastian Silva pointed out these video on the Sur list this week:

5. There is also [[DeploymentTeam/GettingInvolved#Proposals|Proposals Section]] in the wiki for aggregating information about potential grant opportunities for Sugar Labs and region groups. Please help us identify and pursue funding opportunities.

* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x4cz21_comunidad-educa-en-san-jos-de-sisa_school

* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado

6. GNOME: I will be representing Sugar on the GNOME foundation board of advisers. If you have any Sugar-related concerns you would like voiced, please let me know.

6. Hilaire Fernandes, who brought us DrGeo, has a new project underway:

7. Ignorant and seemingly happy that way: It seems there is still quite a bit of misinformation about free software in Texas (See [http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php Teacher Throws Fit]).

:I am working on a learning system written in Smalltalk. The contents is only in French for now, and only cover multiplication

learning, but I am planing for more in various subjects. Underneath the curriculum is modelised in a graph to help situating the learning progression of the learner.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

8. It is not too late to sign up for [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11], which will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January.

7. 9–11 January [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11] at MIT (Cambridge, MA)

 

 

 

 

10. I will try feature a small project each week that someone from the community could tackle. Would someone be willing to create a page in the wiki on how to use IRC? (And perhaps embed a web-based client such as [http://www.mibbit.com mibbit] somewhere?) Thanks.

=== Tech Talk ===

=== Tech Talk ===

9. git.sugarlabs.org: Marco Pesenti Gritti reports that the official repositories for the following modules have moved on git.sugarlabs.org:

11. NM: Simon Schampijer landed wired-interface support for Network Manager. While doing that he reviewed and reworked the "device appears" logic with Eben Eliason. Simon also fixed a bug that could cause the wireless dialog to not appear.

We are still working out some of the details regarding the process of a general migration to the new server.

12. Sucrose 0.83.3: Simon also did help to get [[DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.83.3 Sucrose 0.83.3]] out of the door. The following modules were released this week:

10. Sugar team:

* sugar-0.83.4

Marco's week also included:

13. There were also lots of updates to Sugar Activities this week:

* thinking about how to involve the community more directly in Sugar development; self-contained bundle vs packages with dependencies; and how to better expose information about core modules and activities to developers.

Marco also made good progress on collaboration dog-fooding, which reminds me: since we use Jabber extensively in Sugar, why aren't we using it for our discussions about Sugar?

* Jukebox-6

* TurtleArt-24 (it will now export Logo code to the Journal)

14. Bert Freudenberg made a virtual machine that allows one to [http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html emulate the XO] "in VMWare on a Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a window on a regular screen (fullscreen works, too)."

* working on file transfer in the Journal. Collabora Ltd. employees have been very helpful,

* adapting http://addons.mozilla.org to Sugar activities (with David Farning)

11. Activities:

15. Etoys 4.0: Bert also announced the first release of Etoys 4.0 this week. The major version jump signifies the end of a two-year relicensing effort.

Vincent Povirk reports that the Wine activity (Windows emulator) has advanced to the point where he think it is ready for testing by actual users (See http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine).

:Originally released in 1996, Apple relicensed the Squeak core under the Apache 2.0 license in October 2006 – thanks to Steve, Alan Kay, and the lawyers involved. Then, Viewpoints Research collected written relicensing agreements from several hundred later contributors under the MIT license – thanks to Kim Rose and the Squeak community volunteers. Finally, all the code in Etoys not explicitly covered by a relicensing agreement was removed, or rewritten, or reverted to an earlier version – kudos to Yoshiki Ohshima for the bulk of that work.

I've release TurtleArt-23.xo, which does a local caching of the render SVG images, resulting in a great improvement in launch speed (with the exception of the very first time you run it). Next up for TurtleArt, a save option that outputs Logo code.

We are all looking forward to see Etoys properly packaged in more distributions now that the licensing issues have been cleared up.

Food Force is available for testing (See http://code.google.com/pfoodforce/downloads/list).

* http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-4.0.2201.tar.gz

 

* http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-97.xo

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

12. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-December-6-12-som.jpg|SOM]]).

16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-December-13-19-som.jpg|SOM]]).

 

 

An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.

==Planet==

==Planet==