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=== Sugar Digest ===

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Vote early and often: There is one more week to cast your ballot in the Sugar Oversight Board election. The Selectricity server was (unexpectedly) down for maintenance this past weekend; if you had trouble accessing the server, please try again.

1. Election results: The Sugar community has cast their votes; the newly elected Sugar Oversight Board members are Walter Bender, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Chris Ball, Greg Dekoenigsberg, David Farning, and Bernie Innocenti. We'll be holding our first meeting on the #sugar-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net on Friday, 5 September, at 14:00 UTC. The agenda is available [[Sugar_Labs/OversightBoard/Minutes#Friday_5_September_2008_-_14.00_.28UTC.29|here]].

2. Minsky on learning: On the flight to Austin this weekend, I was rereading Marvin Minsky's ''The Emotion Machine''; I came across this inspiring quote: "We like to think that a child's play is unconstrained—but when children appear to feel joyous and free, this may merely hide from their minds their purposefulness; you can see this more clearly when you attempt to drag them away from their chosen tasks. For they are exploring their worlds to see what's there, making explanations of what those things are, and imagining what else could be; exploring, explaining and learning are among a child's most purposeful urges and goals. The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have. Never again in those children's lives will anything drive them to work so hard."

I'd like to thank the acting board—including Hernán Pachas, Aaron Kaplan, and Ben Schwartz—for all their help over the past three months and also all the candidates who took the time to participate in the election.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

2. Book sprint: Adam Hyde and Anne Gentle organized a Sugar book sprint last week in Austin. We had a large number of participants both in person and online; the results are impressive and hopefully of utility to the Sugar community. Please see [http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar Sugar Manual] and please help us improve the manual. (We also created a manual for the OLPC-XO laptop that is available at [http://en.flossmanuals.net/XO XO manual].) Many thanks to everyone who contributed, including Adam, Anne, David Farning, Mikus Grinbergs, Brian Jordan, Adam Holt, Janet Swisher, Morgan Collett, Yama Ploskonka, David Cramer, Emily Kaplan, Faisal Anwar, Christoph Derndorfer, Sandy Culver, Aaron Konstam, and the Sugar community.

3. Book sprint: We are in the midst of a week-long book sprint, with the goal of creating manual for Sugar. Please follow our progress at [http://en.flossmanuals.net Floss Manuals] and feel free to create an account and help with writing, illustrating, or editing.

3. LiveCD, LiveUSB: A LiveCd is important tool, as it makes it much easier for teachers to try Sugar in their classrooms (where often the school IT department prohibit teachers from install software on school computers). As part of the book-sprint effort (there is a chapter on Getting Sugar), David Farning led an effort to update the Sugar LiveCD and LiveUSB support. With much help from the community, we now have a script that builds LiveCDs and LiveUSBs. The script pulls from the latest Sugar packages (the previously available LiveCDs were based on a very old version of Sugar). We will begin hosting the .iso images for download on sugarlabs.org starting this week.

4. Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores is spreading the word about the upcoming Ceibal Jam in Uruguay (30 August and 6 September). Ceibal Jam is a social movement independent of voluntary and open membership, which seeks nuclear everyone who has an interest in contributing to the development of software with potential usefulness for the Plan Ceibal, is an effort to develop local capacity to create new applications and modify Existing to address the specific needs of the Uruguayan reality. On the occasion of this second jam, introductory workshops will be conducted to programming for computers XO Plan Ceibal, targeted audiences with different levels of knowledge, while also submitted development projects under way and will form groups to work during the days in different proposals programming (Please see [http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/viewforum.php?f=15 mediagala.com]). The meeting is sponsored by the Catholic University of Uruguay, Larrobla & Associates and Artech (Additional information is available at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ceibal_Jam Ceibal Jam]).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. Learning Content: On Sunday, 31 August, at 4PM, OLPC will be hosting a public meeting to discuss (Please see [http://olpcphysics.eventbrite.com OLPC Physics]):

4. OLPC Learning Club, DC: Kevin Cole reports from Washington DC that their learning club has been quite busy over the summer:

* Great teachers have great content they've spent their lifetime developing—how can they contribute to OLPC/Sugar?

* two video conferences with OLPC Ottawa, courtesy of Nortel Networks, which included a demonstration by the DC XO Repair Shoppe folks, and report by Mike Lee on his numerous activities;

* How can we together help with the transition from paper and pencil to Sugar and computing?

* a teleconference with Anna Schoolfield, who was "broadcasting live" from the Birmingham, Alabama XO Expo;

* What learning strategies are OLPC working on?

Materials are available at http://olpclearningclub.org/.

Presentors:

The next meeting is scheduled for 15 November; Dr. Frank Linton, Sheng Zhao, and Matt Gallagher will present a tool for the automated periodic capture of audio data; with an example of its application to monitor honey bee health, part of an  interdisciplinary effort by the Arlington Public Schools STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Program.

* Caryl Bigenho, longtime teacher and senior OLPC support volunteer

Also, on 20 September, the club host another presentation by the XO Repair Shoppe guys: "Setting Up an XO Repair Center."

* Brian Jordan, OLPC Intern, author of Physics Activity ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Bjordan User:Bjordan])

Finally, the club will join Ubuntu DC and HacDC as the upcoming the [http://tpff.org/ Takoma Park Folk Festival].

===Tech Talk===

===Tech Talk===

6. Watch out your teeth! Simon Schampijer and the release team are happy to announce the final release of Sucrose 0.82 (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007911.html). Sucrose 0.82 is the latest version of the Sugar learning platform, consisting of Glucose, the base system environment; and Fructose, a set of demonstration activities. Sucrose is released every six months; the new release contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations.

5. Goals: Simon Schampijer reports good progress on the Sugar Roadmap (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals|0.84 Goals]]).  

 

There are extensive release notes (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.82|Sucrose 0.82]]). Also, please refer to the roadmap for our next release ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Schedule|Roadmap Schedule]]) and join in the discussion of the upcoming 0.84 release ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84|Roadmap 0.84]]).

 

Many people contributed to this release, including those who helped with testing, documentation, translation, contributing to the wiki, outreach to education and developer communities. On behalf of the community, we give our warmest thanks to the developers and contributors who made this Sugar release possible.

I'd like to give special thanks to Simon for managing our most well organized release to date. He has set the bar high for future Sugar release managers.

* Read 50 ([http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/read-activity/Read-50.tar.bz2 source]; [http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Read-50.xo Read-50.xo]) Key fixes/features include fixing several problems involving shared documents; keeping a bookmark across sessions; and inclusion of a preview thumbnail image in the Journal for PDFs.

7. Embedded Sugar: David Farning has been leading a discussion about building an embedded-Sugar community. A group of developers have been assembled to port Sugar to the ([http://beagleboard.org/ Beagleboard]). They plan to use the Open Embedded toolkit ([http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/Main_Page Open Embedded]), which is both a cross-compiler and an embedded package-management system. The team will be using [http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar BeagleBoardSugar] as a point of collaboration as well as the beagleboard mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard?hl=en).

7. Activities survey: Morgan Collett has published a survey of the current state of support for many core Activities (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey Activities Survey]).

8. Measure 19: Arjun Sarwal has release a new version of the Measure activity ([http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/Measure-19.xo Measure19.xo]); please send Arjan feedback as there are extensive changes and enhancements.

8. PlayGo: Andrés Ambrois has made significant progress on the Go Activity. Version 3 ([http://dev.laptop.org/~aa/PlayGo/PlayGo-3.xo PlayGo-3.xo]) includes Journal integration, options to set the board size, more robust collaboration, integration with GnuGo for playing against an AI, and scoring under Japanese rules. Andrés is hoping someone will design a "new kick-ass" icon for the Go Activity.

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. 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-August-16-22-som.jpg]]).

9. 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-August-23-29-som.jpg]]).

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==