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opportunities list. I noticed that both Sebastian Dziallas and Mel Chua are new to Open Hatch as well. They have done a nice job of describing Sugar and Sugar on a Stick.

opportunities list. I noticed that both Sebastian Dziallas and Mel Chua are new to Open Hatch as well. They have done a nice job of describing Sugar and Sugar on a Stick.

The title of my talk was [[User:Walter|"Beyond 'open': Making software easier to modify."]] I began by showing two photos that Bernie Innocenti took in Caacupe, Paraguay. Pictures of smiling children with computer is always a hit, but chose my pictures carefully. The first photo was of two young girls hiding behind their OLPC XO-1 laptops. The laptops had been covered (end-user customized) with stickers ''despite'' the best efforts of the designer. (The XO has bumps on its surface that in order to hide scratches and deter the use of stickers.) The second photo was of two young boys replacing broken displays. In this case the design goal was to enable the end user to make repairs (if not modifications) to the hardware.

The title of my talk was [[User:Walter|"Beyond 'open': Making software easier to modify."]] I began by showing two photos that Bernie Innocenti took in Caacupe, Paraguay. Pictures of smiling children with computer are always a hit, but chose my pictures carefully. The first photo was of two young girls hiding behind their OLPC XO-1 laptops. The laptops had been covered (end-user customized) with stickers ''despite'' the best efforts of the designer. (The XO has bumps on its surface that in order to hide scratches and deter the use of stickers.) The second photo was of two young boys replacing broken displays. In this case the design goal was to enable the end user to make repairs (if not modifications) to the hardware.

I then quoted Eben completely out of context. He had said in the talk prior to mine that only Free Software had achieved the elusive goal of being "write once, run everywhere." I said that Sugar had a different goal. We want our code to be written over and over again by our end users because they will learn in the process. Of course we want to write reliable code that will enable Sugar to run "everywhere" and in fact, we have made great progress in this regard over the past two years, in part by hanging onto the coattails of the GNU/Linux community's efforts. I tried to make the point that the usual metrics — robustness, efficiency, maintainability, etc. — are not enough for education. We need to go a step further by ensuring that our code is free and open but also practically amenable to manipulation. (The license guarantees that all Free Software can be modified by the end user, but for most users, this is just a theoretical freedom.) If everyone learns to write code and if more code is written with end-user modifications in mind, we will have a world in which everyone is engaged in debugging, what Cynthia Solomon described as the great educational opportunity of the 21st Century.

I then quoted Eben completely out of context. He had said in the talk prior to mine that only Free Software had achieved the elusive goal of being "write once, run everywhere." I said that Sugar had a different goal. We want our code to be written over and over again by our end users because they will learn in the process. Of course we want to write reliable code that will enable Sugar to run "everywhere" and in fact, we have made great progress in this regard over the past two years, in part by hanging onto the coattails of the GNU/Linux community's efforts. I tried to make the point that the usual metrics — robustness, efficiency, maintainability, etc. — are not enough for education. We need to go a step further by ensuring that our code is free and open but also practically amenable to manipulation. (The license guarantees that all Free Software can be modified by the end user, but for most users, this is just a theoretical freedom.) If everyone learns to write code and if more code is written with end-user modifications in mind, we will have a world in which everyone is engaged in debugging, what Cynthia Solomon described as the great educational opportunity of the 21st Century.