Sugar Labs

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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

Revision as of 13:08, 2 June 2008

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==What new==
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==What's new==
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=== Sugar Digest (2008-05-26) ===
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=== Sugar Digest (2008-06-02) ===
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1. About this list: Over the two-plus years I was at OLPC, I posted a weekly digest of OLPC news to the community-news@lists.laptop.org list. I also had been updating the news page in the OLPC wiki every weekend. Now that I am devoting my energies to Sugar Labs, I will start posting a weekly digest of Sugar news to community-news@lists.sugarlabs.org (I'll cross post to its.an.education.project@lists.sugarlabs.org and sugar@lists.laptop.org, but I will *not* cross-post to community-news@lists.laptop.org beyond this announcement). Please send me any updates by the weekend for inclusion in what will most often be a Monday-morning post. More information about the list, including subscription instructions and and archives can be found here (http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news).
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1. Software Freedom Conservancy: Sugar Labs is entering discussions with the Software Freedom Conservancy (Please see [http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/overview/]). If we are accepted into the Conservancy, we'd join projects such as Inkscape, Samba, and Wine. The Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions.  
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* sugar@lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing technical details of the Sugar project;
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2. Governance: We will be gathering in Milan at the end of the month of June to discuss, among other things, possible models of governance for Sugar Labs. More details will follow soon.
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* its.an.education.project@lists.sugarlabs.org is a forum for discussing the impact of Sugar (and related technologies, such as Etoys) on learning, including discussion of observations from the field;
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* community-news@lists.sugarlabs.org is a weekly digest of Sugar-related news and discussions;
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* devel@lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing OLPC-XO-specific technical details.
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Other distribution-specific lists are beginning to be made, such as:
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3. Linux Foundation: Walter Bender and Jim Zemlin (Executive Director of the Linux Foundation) met to discuss ways in which we could work together. The Linux Foundation "hosts collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry, and end users", manages a "Technical Fellowships Fund" to ensure key projects get accomplished, and helps promote Linux regionally. Obviously lots of synergy with the Sugar Labs mission!
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* http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-olpc-devel
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4. UMPC abundance: The success of the OLPC XO and the ASUS Eee PC seems to have attracted the attention of the industry: it has been a busy week in the world of ultra-mobile PCs. Dell (See [http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dells-mini-inspiron-eee-pc-killer-revealed/]), Acer (See [http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/first-pics-of-acers-aspire-one-eee-pc-twin/]), Wizbook ([http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/noon-eee-pc-wizbook-hits]), Elonix (See http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8294433279.html), and Kanguru (See [http://pc.kanguru.pt/Home/]) were all making headlines. Each of these machines represents yet another potential platform for running Sugar.
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Other communication channels include:
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* http://planet.sugarlabs.org
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=== Community jams and meetups ===
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* #Sugar on irc.freenode.net
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5. PyOhio: Catherine Devlin is helping to organize a regional miniconference on Python programming Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio (Please see [http://pyohio.org]). Ralph Hyre, a Sugar community organizer in Cincinnati, suggested that someone might be willing to present on Sugar (and OLPC project).  It is just past the date for their "call for proposals", but they may be willing to accept a late submission. (Please email Mat Kovach <matkovach at gmail.com> or call at 216-798-3397.)
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2. It has been just a few weeks since we launched the Sugar Labs initiative and the pace of activity is already picking up. Among the highlights are the creation of wiki.sugarlabs.org (special thanks to Helga Schmidt and Simon Dorner) and creation of the its.an.education.project list (thanks to Aaron Kaplan and Bernardo Innocenti). Thanks also to [http://www.develer.com Develor], Ivan Krstić, and Bernie for helping with the hosting of sugarlabs.org. Greg DeKoenigsberg is working on a LiveCd based on Fedora 9. Firefoxman will be our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org Planet Master].
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The mailing list discussion has seen an interesting progression: it began as a discussion about the relationship between Sugar and the XO laptop and has morphed into a discussion about learning. These trends are evident in some self-organizing maps of the list activity generated by Gary Martin (author of the Moon activity):
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===Tech Talk===
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Compare
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6. Sugar tip of the week: How to install activities. There a several ways to manually install new activities in Sugar:
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      [[:Image:2008-May-01-09-som.jpg]]
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(A) You can use xo-get from the Terminal activity (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xo-get] for the details). Find activities by typing:
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with
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      [[:Image:2008-May-17-23-som.jpg]]
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(Gary has put the image thumbs and some basic text description on his user page—[[User:Garycmartin]]—and is looking for feedback as to how to make these visualizations more useful.)
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./xo-get.py list
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Install activities by typing:
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3. The wiki has already almost 150 registered users and well over 1000 page edits. Highlights include:
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./xo-get.py install <activity-name>
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* [[User Manual]]
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e.g.,
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* [[Supported systems]]
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* [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap]]
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* [[ReleaseTeam]]
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* [[Taxonomy]]
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* [[Request New Features]]
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Be sure also visit:
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./xo-get.py install simcity
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* [[Community]]
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or
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* [[Community/GettingInvolved]]
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* [[Community/FAQ]]
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We are discussing the goals and principles of Sugar Labs here:
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./xo-get.py install /media/<USB stick name>/simcity.xo
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* [[Sugar Labs]]
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(B) You can also install pre-bundled activities from the Terminal activity or, if you have an XO laptop, from a customization key (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_key):
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* [[Talk:Sugar Labs]]
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=== Community jams and meet-ups ===
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./sugar-install-bundle /media/<USB stick name>/<Activity name.xo>
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4. Family XO Mesh Meet-up: Mike Lee teamed up with Kevin Cole to host an event at Gallaudet University on 24 May. (See http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/summer-blockbusters-at-gallaudet/ for event details.) Photos from the meeting can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157604752586251/.
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(C) You can install activities from the browser, either over the internet or from USB (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Install_an_activity for details):
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Yamandu Ploskonka reports that Ceibal had a jam this weekend (Please see http://proyecto-ceibal.blogspot.com/2008/05/breve-resumen-del-primer-ceibal-jam.html).
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a. open the Browse Activity
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b. point it to an activity bundle, e.g., http://web.media.mit.edu/~jmaloney/scratch-xo/Scratch-5.xo or file:///media/<USB stick name>/Scratch-5.xo
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c. When the download is complete, a journal entry will have been created. "Resume" the activity from the journal. Hence forth, it will appear in the list of installed activities.
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7. SocialCalc: Dan Bricklin has been hard at work on the base SocialCalc code. In the next few weeks he hopes to have a new build for available. It will include a new tab with "Settings" that shows all of the attributes of the current cell and sheet; it provides access to all of the formatting options, including custom formats and colors, padding, fonts, etc. Also, it should be better suited for localization in that it will have a single Constants file with pretty much all of the customizable values for the spreadsheet engine (but not the UI above the sheet yet). At the point of this new release, Dan thinks we should have something very useful for people to try.
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5a. Peru Jam: Hernan Pachas is organizing a jam during the VISION 2008 and Open Source Day planned for October at the University of San Martin de Porres (USMP). Details will be forthcoming.  
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8. Metacity: Sayamindu Dasgupta has been experimenting with replacing Matchbox with a Metacity as the window manager that runs behind Sugar. Despite the fact that the Sugar UI is different from a standard desktop, it is almost completely implemented using standard window manager hints and properties, thus a move to a more compliant window manager will make it possible to run standard desktop applications directly within Sugar (Please follow the discussion at [[WindowManagement]]).
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5b. Aymara Jam: Together with Runasimipi, who already have translated Abiword into Aymara, Yama is helping organize a jam in La Paz, Bolivia to translate Sugar into Aymara, likely in October 2008 (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Aymara_Fest).
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A RPM of Sayamindu's patch is available for download ([http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_metacity/metacity-2.23.21-2.olpc2.i386.rpm]), however, he warns that you should *not* install this patch on your standard desktop machine yet. Things which have not been resolved yet include: (1) Some activities tend to go into full screen mode automatically; (2) Activity switching does not work yet; (3) Some palettes and windows are placed incorrectly; (4) The mouse cursor theme switches back to the normal (default??) one; and (5) Memory usage with compositing enabled is high.
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9. Rainbow: Michael Stone released rainbow-0.7.13 with a fix for #6989, a problem that was interfering with the launching of the Browse activity.
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6. Unconference: In the tradition of Barcamp, OLPC will be holding a grassroots "unconference" the weekend of 7 June, dedicated towards community-organization, and initiatives, events, structures, and best practices. This is not just an OLPC event—anyone with interest in grassroots organizing is invited to attend. (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_unconference or contact Mel Chua at mel at laptop.org for more information.)
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10. Automated testing: Michael has offered Xen hosting for Sugar Labs' automated testing efforts. (Xen is a FOSS standard for virtualization—please see [http://xen.org] for details.)
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11. Wikipedia activity: Chris Ball has made the first release of the Wikipedia activity, which contains a
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30,000 article offline snapshot of the Spanish Wikipedia with 3,000 images. The activity is based on code from Patrick Collison's "wikipedia-iphone" project; this version was mostly developed by community volunteers: thanks to Wade Brainerd (porting from the wikipedia-iphone code to a Python activity, fixing parser bugs), Ben Schwartz (image download and scaling, bug-fixing) and Madeleine Ball (algorithms for article and image selection). Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/eswiki/] and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse] for the download and more details.
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7. Bootcamp: OLPC is also hosting a bootcamp and conference from 9–12 June 2008 in Cambridge, MA for current and future organizers of local groups. The objective of the bootcamp is to help community members become grassroots advisors, who can serve as resources to others who want to start local initiatives. (Please contact Mel for more information.)
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12. Chat: Morgan Collett worked on private invites for Chat, although his final testing was blocked by a palette problem in Sugar. Morgan has also filed a patch for Ticket #5767 that uses black text on light fill colors to improve legibility.
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13. Browse: Tomeu Visozo has added some more palette options to content in Browse, including copy, paste, undo, redo commands to the Browse toolbar. (Tomeu also fixed a problem with activity order in the activity list and shell.)
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8. Grassroots Jam: a jam will be held in New York City on 14–15 June 2008, run by the bootcamp attendees. The jam, open to
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14. Icons: Scott Ananian has added a bit of functionality to his (still incomplete) icon-draw-activity; it is on the path to becoming a complete "convert SVGs into proper Sugar icons" tool. (Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/icon-draw-activity] for details.) Scott also filed bugs with improved icons for scratch (#7140), gcompris (#7138), paint (#7139), turtle art (#6836), and wikibrowse.
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everyone, will focus on development of individual and group projects that could work on/with Sugar and/or XO laptops. (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_Jam for more information.)
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=== Tech Talk ===
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9. BugSquad: David Farning is forming a Sugar BugSquad. His goals are:
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* Squash bugs;
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* Develop the concept of teams within sugar development community; and
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* Start recruiting community members in an orderly manner to the project.
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Most of the early effort will be developing a triage guide and working through the backlog of bugs. Where appropriate, David is basing the Sugar bugsquad off the Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu bugsquads. (Please see [[BugSquad]] for more information.)
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10. Debian: Jonas Smedegaard reports that the status of the Sugar source package Debian's testing distribution has changed.
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Previous version: (not in testing)
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Current version:  0.79.4-2
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All core Sugar packages are now in Debian testing! Please speak up if you are interested in helping out.
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=== Sugar Labs ===
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11. v-toys: V-toys, a visual scripting system compatible with Etoys, is now available (Please see http://community.ofset.org/index.php/V-toys_international); you'll find some documentation and tutorials on the same page.
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15. LinuxTag: Simon Schampijer reports that Members of the Sugar community (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:LinuxTag-2008-Bernie-Reinier-Marco-Simon-Bert-Tomeu.jpg) met this weekend at the Linuxtag 2008 ([http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/]) in Berlin. Besides meeting people in person and the usual putting faces to names, they discussed the current situation of Sugar: hot topics Sugar on multiple platforms and the structure Sugar Labs.
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Thanks to OLPC Germany and especially to Holger Levsen, there was also an opportunity to give an introduction  to Sugar to the winners of an Idea Contest ([http://wiki.olpc-deutschland.de/Start?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=LinuxTag-2008-OLPC-Deutschland-Developers.jpg]). Robert Krahn gave a tutorial about using Squeak on the XO and Wolfgang Rohrmoser handed out a
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XO-Live CD ([ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/]) to people who were interested in trying out Sugar on their machines.
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12. iStoa.net: Hilaire Fernandes reports that iSTOA, a platform interactive educational activities and monitoring via the Internet, which runs on top of Squeak, can run on the XO laptop (Please see http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/2008/05/24/iStoanet-lands-on-Olpc).
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16. SOM: Gary Martin has prepared this weeks SOM of the its.an.education.project list (Please see [[:Image:2008-May-24-30-som.jpg]]). Organization and governance seem to be hot topics (The list archive can be found at [http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/]).
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17. Wiki: David Farning has been very busy organizing the Sugar Labs wiki. His focus has been on building a framework to support teams within the community:
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13. Gnash: Rob Savoye reminds us that the most uptodate Gnash builds can be found on http://getgnash.org and that we are in need of someone to maintain gnash rpms.
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* AccessibiltyTeam - Responsible for accessibility issues within Sugar.
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* BugSquad - Responsible for locating and fixing bugs.
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* BuildTeam - Responsible for creating daily and release builds.
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* DevelopmentTeam - Responsible for Developing the software modules within Sugar.
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* DocumentationTeam - Responsible for writing both user and technical documentation.
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* EducationTeam - Responsible for setting the Educational goals for the sugar Community.
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* MarketingTeam - Responsible for marketing the Sugar brand and product.
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* ReleaseTeam - Responsible for shipping the current release and planning for up coming releases.
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* Sugar Labs - Responsible for governance and fund raising.
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* TranslationTeam - Responsible for the translation needs of the community.
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* UITeam - Responsible for the User interface.
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* WikiTeam - Responsible for the Sugar Labs wiki.
 
 
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14. Sugar core: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Simon Schampijer have been working on a variety of Sugar improvements.
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The community portal ([[Community]]) has a link to each teams' section within the wiki.
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Tomeu has worked on:
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* Show the installation date of activity bundles in the activity list;
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* Implement search in the activity list;
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* Reviewed and merged a patch contributed by Eric Burns for showing a notification when an item is added to the clipboard;
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* Reviewed and merged Eben Eliason's work for activating palettes on right click;
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* Added a palette to links in Browse. For now it allows copying the link to the clipboard. Other features will be added to this palette soon.
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Simon worked in getting the [[Taxonomy#Sucrose:_The_interface.2C_plus_a_set_of_demonstration_activities|Sucrose]] [[ReleaseTeam/CurrentRelease/Sucrose|release 0.81.1]] out of the door (See [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Timeline]]). An announcement will follow soon. Simon also worked on Browse Version 87, which is the release version for Sucrose 0.81.1. It has some pylint cleanups, fixes downloads with latest xulrunner beta5 and replaces the 'Open' label with a 'Show in Journal' one in the download alert.
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Marco was busy with:
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* Coordination and process/infrastructure work for Sucrose 0.81.1;
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* Allow palettes to be created lazily, which should help performance quite a bit when we start using it;
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* Discussion with Michael Stone about release management.
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Walter Bender met with teams from Peru, Uruguay, and Paraguay to discuss a process for in-field testing of new Sugar features. We agreed to develop a process whereby we can conduct tests of new features with children using Sugar on a daily basis. Details will be posted in the wiki (See [[Testing]] for details as they develop).
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=== Sugar Labs ===
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15. Walter has been in discussions with the Software Freedom Law Center regarding how to best structure Sugar Labs such that it is aligned with the principles of FOSS. Stay tuned.
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16. Bernie was busy with:
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* Performance and reliability work on trinity, the server hosting this wiki;
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* Setup of http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ ;
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* Setup of a download directory on trinity and a mirror of it on http://download.sugarlabs.org/ ;
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* Migration of the mailing lists.
      
==Sugar in the news==
 
==Sugar in the news==
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