Archive/Current Events/2008-05-26

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Sugar Digest (2008-05-26)

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).

  • sugar@lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing technical details of the Sugar project;
  • 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;
  • community-news@lists.sugarlabs.org is a weekly digest of Sugar-related news and discussions;
  • devel@lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing OLPC-XO-specific technical details.

Other distribution-specific lists are beginning to be made, such as:

Other communication channels include:


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 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 Planet Master.

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):

Compare 

      Image:2008-May-01-09-som.jpg

with 

      Image:2008-May-17-23-som.jpg

(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.)


3. The wiki has already almost 150 registered users and well over 1000 page edits. Highlights include:

Be sure also visit:

We are discussing the goals and principles of Sugar Labs here:

Community jams and meet-ups

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/.

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).


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.

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).


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.)


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.)


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 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.)

Tech Talk

9. BugSquad: David Farning is forming a Sugar BugSquad. His goals are:

  • Squash bugs;
  • Develop the concept of teams within sugar development community; and
  • Start recruiting community members in an orderly manner to the project.

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.)

10. Debian: Jonas Smedegaard reports that the status of the Sugar source package Debian's testing distribution has changed.

Previous version: (not in testing) Current version: 0.79.4-2

All core Sugar packages are now in Debian testing! Please speak up if you are interested in helping out.


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.


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).


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.


14. Sugar core: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Simon Schampijer have been working on a variety of Sugar improvements.

Tomeu has worked on:

  • Show the installation date of activity bundles in the activity list;
  • Implement search in the activity list;
  • Reviewed and merged a patch contributed by Eric Burns for showing a notification when an item is added to the clipboard;
  • Reviewed and merged Eben Eliason's work for activating palettes on right click;
  • 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.

Simon worked in getting the Sucrose release 0.81.1 out of the door (See Development Team/Release/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.

Marco was busy with:

  • Coordination and process/infrastructure work for Sucrose 0.81.1;
  • Allow palettes to be created lazily, which should help performance quite a bit when we start using it;
  • Discussion with Michael Stone about release management.


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 BugSquad/Resources for details as they develop).

Sugar Labs

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.


16. Bernie was busy with:

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