User:Cjl/Candidate Statement

Sugar Labs Oversight Board Candidate Statement 2013-2014

I have decided to stand as a candidate for re-election to the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.

Since placing my G1G1 order on the first day of availability back in 2007, I've been very interested in learning how I could contribute to the goals of the education mission articulated by OLPC. With the spin out of Sugar Labs in 2008, I joined as a member of Sugar Labs, but have long considered myself to hold "dual-citizenship".

I've worked on many aspects of the effort. In the early days, I did a great deal of work on the wikis, earning the medal of the "Order of the Mop and Bucket" (wiki admin) and even rising to "b'crat" status. I've been a member of the OLPC Support Gang answering help and collaboration requests in the OLPC RT system and working to "weave together the grassroots". I've also done testing of activities and filed numerous bugs in the OLPC, Sugar Labs and Etoys bug trackers, as well as performing a lot of ticket clean up of older tickets as a general contribution to maintenance. I've explored content development, producing a Latin America and Caribbean targeted .xol content bundle containing the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in about 100 languages, including a number of spoken audio versions.

In recent years I've been focusing my efforts on the Localization community, working with and then picking up tasks from Sayamindu Dasgupta as he made his transition to graduate school and in the process took on responsibilities as the Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator. In that role I have worked to expand our language coverage and facilitate the recruitment and empowerment of members of the Localization community that spans Sugar Labs / OLPC and Etoys. I have advocated on behalf of improvements in internationalization and localization of our products as well as the tools to perform that work. I've performed extensive outreach to upstream and downstream efforts to improve the overall L10n ecosystem. We now host translation for Gnash and AbiWord upstream's as well as the Waveplace downstream. I arranged for the Gnome team to provide us with a "release set" to facilitate our tracking of the upstream L10n bits we pull from them, as well as facilitating upstream contributions by our localizers that will ultimately benefit our users.

I try to be a frequent presence in the open meetings of the various Sugar Labs teams IRC meetings and I have advocated for attention to the needs of our language communities in those forums as well as encouraging collaborative effort among Sugar Labs teams and upstream outreach to the wider FOSS community.

I've gained a wide angle view of Sugar Lab's work, as well as having delved into excruciating detail in a number of areas. I've had the opportunity to work with a broad variety of stakeholders and I hope to use this perspective to help Sugar Labs grow it's community and reach it goals.

With the TripAdvisor grant for i18n/L10n, I hope to be very engaged in expanding Sugar's L10n into indigenous languages and other neglected languages where there are substantial Sugar deployments in order to help provide a native language learning experience where ever possible.