Difference between revisions of "Sugar Labs/Current Events"

Revision as of 09:51, 23 December 2008

What's new

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at 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.)

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Sugar Digest

1. gitorious: It was time to try migrating TurtleArt, the project I am maintaining, over to git.sugarlabs.org. The new git system we are using, gitorious, has a user interface that is more "web-friendly" than any git systems I have used before. It does a good job of leading through the process of creating new projects. One of the nice things about it is that anyone can create or fork a project unilaterally, thus I think it will work well with the distributed nature of Sugar development. (So fork your favorite project (TurtleArt) in order to try out your ideas!!!) I would recommend Marco Pesenti Gritti's quick guide to migrating projects and you may want to learn from my mistakes as well.

2. Sugar and GNOME:

BOSTON, Mass — December 22, 2008 — Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.

"The resources made available by the GNOME project have been essential to the development of the Sugar learning platform", says Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs. "The Sugar community looks forward to working more closely with the GNOME Foundation on topics such as GNOME Mobile and an upstream collaboration framework." Walter Bender will be representing Sugar Labs on the GNOME Advisory Board.

GNOME forms the basis of many platforms such as Sugar, Maemo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and also delivers the desktop platform offered by companies such as Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies.

"The GNOME Foundation is excited to have Sugar Labs join the advisory board." says Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. "Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability. The interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in the future."

3. Sugar Labs™: Karen Sandler, a lawyer at the Software Freedom Conservancy, who has been helping us will all things legal has confirmed that our trademark application for the name Sugar Labs has been submitted to the USPTO (with the Conservancy, our parent organization, named as the applicant). "They indicate in our receipt that it will be 4–5 months before we are assigned an examining attorney. In the meantime the mark is a 'pending' application." Karen will start working on a trademark policy for Sugar that we will post in the wiki.

4. Mobilis (Encore): It is summer in Brazil. Paulo Drummond was the first one to bring to my attention that Mobilis has won a bid to bring 150,000 laptops to children in Brazil. (OLPC did not participate in the bid.) As I understand it, it will be running a Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. There has already been some preliminary discussion about a Sugar port to Mandriva. Let's make it happen.

5. Dailymotion seems to be the site where videos about learning projects are being aggregated. Sebastian Silva pointed out these video on the Sur list this week:

6. Hilaire Fernandes, who brought us DrGeo, has a new project underway:

I am working on a learning system written in Smalltalk. The contents is only in French for now, and only cover multiplication

learning, but I am planing for more in various subjects. Underneath the curriculum is modelised in a graph to help situating the learning progression of the learner.

See http://www.istoa.net.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

7. 9–11 January FUDConF11 at MIT (Cambridge, MA)

8. 25 April 2009 El Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL) in Caracas, Venezuela

9. Lionel Laske posted a report about the OLPC France Code Camp held on 25 November in Paris. 40 attendees participated in a series of workshops:

The learning workshop participants drafted requirements for a French version of WikiBrowse and investigated the possibility of doing animation on an OLPC-XO.
The translation workshop participants translated the FLOSS Manual.
The School Server participants workshop focused on network configuration.
The Sugar workshop participants workd on a Mind-Mapping activity and video integration.
The Mono workshop participants wrote tutorials about designing Sugar Activity for C#/Mono developers.

Help wanted

10. I will try feature a small project each week that someone from the community could tackle. Would someone be willing to create a page in the wiki on how to use IRC? (And perhaps embed a web-based client such as mibbit somewhere?) Thanks.

Tech Talk

11. NM: Simon Schampijer landed wired-interface support for Network Manager. While doing that he reviewed and reworked the "device appears" logic with Eben Eliason. Simon also fixed a bug that could cause the wireless dialog to not appear.

12. Sucrose 0.83.3: Simon also did help to get DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.83.3 Sucrose 0.83.3 out of the door. The following modules were released this week:

sugar-0.83.4
sugar-base-0.83.2
sugar-datastore-0.83.1
sugar-toolkit-0.83.3
sugar-artwork-0.83.2

13. There were also lots of updates to Sugar Activities this week:

Jukebox-6
Read-62
Browse-102
Chat-61
TurtleArt-24 (it will now export Logo code to the Journal)
TurtleArtwithSensors-5 (updated to accommodate the switch from numeric to numpy)
ImageViewer-5
Terminal-21
Colors!-13

14. Bert Freudenberg made a virtual machine that allows one to emulate the XO "in VMWare on a Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a window on a regular screen (fullscreen works, too)."

15. Etoys 4.0: Bert also announced the first release of Etoys 4.0 this week. The major version jump signifies the end of a two-year relicensing effort.

Originally released in 1996, Apple relicensed the Squeak core under the Apache 2.0 license in October 2006 – thanks to Steve, Alan Kay, and the lawyers involved. Then, Viewpoints Research collected written relicensing agreements from several hundred later contributors under the MIT license – thanks to Kim Rose and the Squeak community volunteers. Finally, all the code in Etoys not explicitly covered by a relicensing agreement was removed, or rewritten, or reverted to an earlier version – kudos to Yoshiki Ohshima for the bulk of that work.

We are all looking forward to see Etoys properly packaged in more distributions now that the licensing issues have been cleared up.

Sources:

Packaged:

Sugar Labs

16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

22 Dec 2008	The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008	Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008	NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008	SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008	Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008	Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008	Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008	Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
16 Sep 2008	Open Source – Sugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008	OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008	Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008	OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008	Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008	OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008	PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008	Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008	LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008	Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008	Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008	Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008	The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008	Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008	BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008	OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008	PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008	MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008	News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008	Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
16 May 2008	Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008	xconomy – Bender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008	BBC – '$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008	OLPC wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008	Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

9 Dec 2008	Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
15 May 2008	Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)
+=== Community News archive ===
+An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.
 === Sugar Digest ===
-. Sugar narrative: Caroline Meeks and I participated in a readathon at the Gardner School in Allston last week, giving us an opportunity to spend some time in classrooms in the school where we are planning a Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot. We also had an opportunity to meet with a former classroom teacher who is now focusing full time on curriculum development. There was synergy between all of our goals: good things will happen. However, one thing became obvious very early in the discussion: we are lacking a good narrative about Sugar and how it is used in schools. We have lots of pictures of children with laptops, but few of these pictures are illustrative of learning. We have some data—most notably from the Peru deployment—about the impact of Sugar on learning, but again, these are data illustrating results, not the process of achieving those results. While more deployment guides and lesson plans are being written, we still lack a compelling narrative.
+. gitorious: It was time to try migrating TurtleArt, the project I am maintaining, over to git.sugarlabs.org. The new git system we are using, gitorious, has a user interface that is more "web-friendly" than any git systems I have used before. It does a good job of leading through the process of creating new projects. One of the nice things about it is that anyone can create or fork a project unilaterally, thus I think it will work well with the distributed nature of Sugar development. (So fork your favorite project (TurtleArt) in order to try out your ideas!!!) I would recommend Marco Pesenti Gritti's [[DevelopmentTeam/Git|quick guide to migrating projects]] and you may want to [[User:Walter#gitorious|learn from my mistakes]] as well.
+. Sugar and GNOME:
+:BOSTON, Mass — December 22, 2008 — Sugar Labs, a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+ and Telepathy.
+:"The resources made available by the GNOME project have been essential to the development of the Sugar learning platform", says Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs. "The Sugar community looks forward to working more closely with the GNOME Foundation on topics such as GNOME Mobile and an upstream collaboration framework." Walter Bender will be representing Sugar Labs on the GNOME Advisory Board.
+:GNOME forms the basis of many platforms such as Sugar, Maemo, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and also delivers the desktop platform offered by companies such as Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies.
-Maybe it is time to dust off an old idea: Why don't we create ''a day in the life of Sugar'', a movie/telenovela/graphic novel about various experiences with Sugar in the classroom? We have loads of material—we just need to start telling the story. Anyone interested in taking the lead on this project?
+:"The GNOME Foundation is excited to have Sugar Labs join the advisory board." says Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. "Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability. The interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in the future."
-. OLPC's Change the World program: It is refreshing to read that OLPC is beginning to embrace programs at a scale that can be launched at a grassroots level. Let's hope that this bottom-up approach is given a chance to get some momentum.
+. Sugar Labs™: Karen Sandler, a lawyer at the Software Freedom Conservancy, who has been helping us will all things legal has confirmed that our trademark application for the name Sugar Labs has been submitted to the USPTO (with the Conservancy, our parent organization, named as the applicant). "They indicate in our receipt that it will be 4–5 months before we are assigned an examining attorney. In the meantime the mark is a 'pending' application." Karen will start working on a trademark policy for
+Sugar that we will post in the wiki.
-. Sugar Workshop plan: Rafael Ortiz posted [http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/Deployment_guide_sur/TallerBuinaima the workshop plan] from a teacher workshop that took place at the Bunaima Foundation in Bogota, Colombia.
+. Mobilis (Encore): It is summer in Brazil. Paulo Drummond was the first one to bring to my attention that Mobilis has won a bid to bring 150,000 laptops to children in Brazil. (OLPC did not participate in the bid.) As I understand it, it will be running a Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. There has already been some preliminary discussion about a Sugar port to Mandriva. Let's make it happen.
-. Local labs: We've been discussing frameworks for local/regional Sugar Labs. Please join the weekly discussion of the deployment team on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net channel #sugar-meeting. We'd appreciate more input from deployment teams around the world. There is a [[DeploymentTeam/Local_Lab_MOU|draft of a sample memorandum of understanding (MOU)]] between Sugar Labs and any organization that would like to establish a local lab. Please add your comments.
+. [http://www.dailymotion.com Dailymotion] seems to be the site where videos about learning projects are being aggregated. Sebastian Silva pointed out these video on the Sur list this week:
-. There is also [[DeploymentTeam/GettingInvolved#Proposals|Proposals Section]] in the wiki for aggregating information about potential grant opportunities for Sugar Labs and region groups. Please help us identify and pursue funding opportunities.
+* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x4dfmt_comunidad-educa-en-gillipcha-chacha_school
+* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x49m4e_comunidad-educa-en-tucaque-fras_school
+* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x4cz21_comunidad-educa-en-san-jos-de-sisa_school
+* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado
-. GNOME: I will be representing Sugar on the GNOME foundation board of advisers. If you have any Sugar-related concerns you would like voiced, please let me know.
+. Hilaire Fernandes, who brought us DrGeo, has a new project underway:
-. Ignorant and seemingly happy that way: It seems there is still quite a bit of misinformation about free software in Texas (See [http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php Teacher Throws Fit]).
+:I am working on a learning system written in Smalltalk. The contents is only in French for now, and only cover multiplication
+learning, but I am planing for more in various subjects. Underneath the curriculum is modelised in a graph to help situating the learning progression of the learner.
+See http://www.istoa.net.
 === Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===
-. It is not too late to sign up for [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11], which will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January.
+. 9–11 January [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11] at MIT (Cambridge, MA)
+. 25 April 2009 [http://installfest.info/FLISOL2009/Venezuela/Caracas El Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL)] in Caracas, Venezuela
+. Lionel Laske posted a [http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=CodeCampReport report about the OLPC France Code Camp] held on 25 November in Paris. 40 attendees participated in a series of workshops:
+* The learning workshop participants drafted requirements for a French version of WikiBrowse and investigated the possibility of doing animation on an OLPC-XO.
+* The translation workshop participants translated the FLOSS Manual.
+* The School Server participants workshop focused on network configuration.
+* The Sugar workshop participants workd on a Mind-Mapping activity and video integration.
+* The Mono workshop participants wrote tutorials about designing Sugar Activity for C#/Mono developers.
+=== Help wanted ===
+. I will try feature a small project each week that someone from the community could tackle. Would someone be willing to create a page in the wiki on how to use IRC? (And perhaps embed a web-based client such as [http://www.mibbit.com mibbit] somewhere?) Thanks.
 === Tech Talk ===
-. git.sugarlabs.org: Marco Pesenti Gritti reports that the official repositories for the following modules have moved on git.sugarlabs.org:
+. NM: Simon Schampijer landed wired-interface support for Network Manager. While doing that he reviewed and reworked the "device appears" logic with Eben Eliason. Simon also fixed a bug that could cause the wireless dialog to not appear.
-* sugar
-* sugar-base
-* sugar-toolkit
-* sugar-datastore
-* sugar-presence-service
-* sugar-jhbuild
-* read
-* chat
-We are still working out some of the details regarding the process of a general migration to the new server.
+. Sucrose 0.83.3: Simon also did help to get [[DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.83.3 Sucrose 0.83.3]] out of the door. The following modules were released this week:
-. Sugar team:
+* sugar-0.83.4
+* sugar-base-0.83.2
+* sugar-datastore-0.83.1
+* sugar-toolkit-0.83.3
+* sugar-artwork-0.83.2
-Marco's week also included:
+. There were also lots of updates to Sugar Activities this week:
-* looking into palette bugs in Sugar 0.83;
-* starting a [[DevelopmentTeam/TODO|team TODO]], as substitute for the roadmap, which will be reviewed weekly;
-* writing about upstream/downstream relations with Sugar Labs;
-* updating jhbuild dependencies (to keep up with Tomeu Vizoso's changes);
-* discussing with Mel Chau and Simon Schampijer about testing team and bug squad; and
-* thinking about how to involve the community more directly in Sugar development; self-contained bundle vs packages with dependencies; and how to better expose information about core modules and activities to developers.
-Marco also made good progress on collaboration dog-fooding, which reminds me: since we use Jabber extensively in Sugar, why aren't we using it for our discussions about Sugar?
+* Jukebox-6
+* Read-62
+* Browse-102
+* Chat-61
+* TurtleArt-24 (it will now export Logo code to the Journal)
+* TurtleArtwithSensors-5 (updated to accommodate the switch from numeric to numpy)
+* ImageViewer-5
+* Terminal-21
+* Colors!-13
-Tomeu's week included:
+. Bert Freudenberg made a virtual machine that allows one to [http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html emulate the XO] "in VMWare on a Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a window on a regular screen (fullscreen works, too)."
-* working on file transfer in the Journal. Collabora Ltd. employees have been very helpful,
-especially Guillaume Desmottes.
-* adapting http://addons.mozilla.org to Sugar activities (with David Farning)
-. Activities:
+. Etoys 4.0: Bert also announced the first release of Etoys 4.0 this week. The major version jump signifies the end of a two-year relicensing effort.
-Vincent Povirk reports that the Wine activity (Windows emulator) has advanced to the point where he think it is ready for testing by actual users (See http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine).
+:Originally released in 1996, Apple relicensed the Squeak core under the Apache 2.0 license in October 2006 – thanks to Steve, Alan Kay, and the lawyers involved. Then, Viewpoints Research collected written relicensing agreements from several hundred later contributors under the MIT license – thanks to Kim Rose and the Squeak community volunteers. Finally, all the code in Etoys not explicitly covered by a relicensing agreement was removed, or rewritten, or reverted to an earlier version – kudos to Yoshiki Ohshima for the bulk of that work.
-I've release TurtleArt-23.xo, which does a local caching of the render SVG images, resulting in a great improvement in launch speed (with the exception of the very first time you run it). Next up for TurtleArt, a save option that outputs Logo code.
+We are all looking forward to see Etoys properly packaged in more distributions now that the licensing issues have been cleared up.
-Food Force is available for testing (See http://code.google.com/pfoodforce/downloads/list).
+Sources:
+* http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-4.0.2201.tar.gz
+* http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Etoys/Etoys-97.tar.gz
+Packaged:
+* http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-4.0.2201-1.noarch.rpm
+* http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-97.xo
 === Sugar Labs ===
-. 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-December-6-12-som.jpg|SOM]]).
+. 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-December-13-19-som.jpg|SOM]]).
-=== Community News archive ===
-An '''[[Sugar Labs/Current Events/Archive|archive]]''' of this digest is available.
 ==Planet==