Sugar Labs

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Mission

The mission of Sugar Labs^® is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with the Sugar learning platform.

Sugar is based on the following principles:

everyone is a teacher and a learner;
humans by their nature are social beings;
humans by their nature are expressive;
you learn through doing; and
love is a better master than duty.

See this Community news post from 10-Mar-2009, on ...our “Big Overarching Vision Goals for 2009”...

Teams

Sugar Labs is organized around overlapping Teams. Please use the Community panel in the wiki sidebar to visit and explore the work and events for each team. This Team category page collects all Sugar Labs wiki pages with a Team tag.

Projects

Sugar Labs is working on a few projects focused on delivering specific goals in a defined time period. The Projects panel in the wiki sidebar holds our premier projects. Please also see these project home pages:

| Replacing Textbooks | Math4 Project |

| Summer of Code |

Sugar Labs: a community

for learning and software-development

The Sugar development platform is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs” is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy (a non-profit foundation to produce and distribute and support the use of free software) and serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.

Education Goals

Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus, Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:

To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere
To explore and share best practices
To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning
To provide mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results.

Technical Goals

Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on “activities” rather than “applications.” The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:

To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.
To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be “simple” to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.
To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and example code that uses these APIs.
To make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.

Community Goals

Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:

To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support.
To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation.
To provide integration and customization services.

Principles

In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to the principles described here, which are the author's own translation of an original text in Spanish.

Identity

Clear mission – Fully disclosed objectives.
Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
Declared outside connections – Relationships with other organizations explicitly listed.

Structure

Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
Activities described – All of the ongoing work is acknowledged.

See Wiki Structure for a guide to how the wiki models Sugar Labs' structure.

Operation

Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on one's skills, results, and contributors’ support.
Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.

Information

Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
We try to operate en plein air.
Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what matters are confidential, why, and who can access them.

Goods

Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed. (Please see/contribute to the discussion here.)
Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
Public accounts – It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.
A special thanks to our contributors.

Governance

Informed by the above principles, Sugar Labs has a governance model.

Roadmap

The Sugar Community roadmap is used to guide our community efforts:

Mission, Vision, Values
Distribution
Deployments
Quality Assurance
Infrastructure

Community News

A current events page updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The Sugar Digest is also sent to the community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org list and blogged at walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

An archive of Sugar Digests is available.

Events Calendar

Sugar community events are posted in a public calendar within the Google Calendar system. The calendar is available in a variety of formats: .

Please contact User:Walter if you'd like to post an event to the calendar. Or simply post it below and it will be included.

Local Labs

A local Sugar Lab adapts the technology and pedagogy to an area's culture and resources (e.g., developing activities and content specific to a region); helps translate Sugar to the local language(s); supports Sugar deployments in area schools; creates a local community devoted to the Sugar Labs principles, making Sugar more open and sustainable; provides for communication, between the local communities and the global Sugar Labs community; develops Local content and software that can be used not only for local purposes but also for the overall community; hosts, co-hosts or partners in the organization of conferences, workshops, talks and meetings related to the use or development of Sugar.

Please visit these Local Labs:

Local Lab wiki portal

Sugar Labs Colombia	Chile Local Labs
Sugar Labs DC	Sugar Labs Peru
Sugar Labs Argentina	Who's next?

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