[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-12-09

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. SFC: Sugar Labs and the Software Freedom Conservancy have (finally)
issued a joint press release regarding our joining the conservancy.

Sugar Labs joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

Boston, MA, December 9 2008: Sugar Labs today announced its membership
in the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization of free and open
source software projects. Sugar Labs supports the free and open source
desktop environment, Sugar, originally created for the One Laptop per
Child Project (OLPC). The Sugar community now has an active global
developer base that is focused on engaging young children in learning
through computing and the Internet. As a member of the Conservancy the
Sugar community will work to accelerate the adoption of the Sugar
learning platform and strengthening the project by attracting new
industry members and community contributors.

In May 2008, the Sugar project became independent of OLPC, making
Sugar available to a wider community of Sugar developers and users.
Subsequently Sugar has been ported to Debian, Ubuntu, and other
GNU/Linux distributions. Sugar can now run on almost any computer
hardware. In October 2008, Sugar Labs released Sugar Version 0.82,
which features enhanced usability and stability. In November, Sugar
announced the availability of the pre-alpha version of "Sugar on a
Stick", a LiveUSB image of Sugar that gives children access to Sugar
on any computer with just a USB key. Joining the Conservancy is an
important milestone in the path towards making Sugar available to
children everywhere.

Founded in March 2006, the Conservancy allows developers of its member
projects to unite under a common organization which provides
much-needed administrative services to them. This structure spares
each software project the burden of starting and maintaining its own
independent non-profit organization. Sugar labs has joined as the
Conservancy's fifteenth member project.

And Sugar is now listed on the
http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/members page at the
conservancy. A tip of the hat to Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler for
their hard work on behalf of Sugar Labs.

2. Sugar local: Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva are making progress
on Sugar Labs Colombia. They now have email addresses (@
co.sugarlabs.org) for their members and a new list (sugar-colombia AT
co.sugarlabs.org). A wiki and a static landing site are being built.

3. Sugar style: It was remarked on one of the lists that there is no
introduction to Sugar for people with preconceptions about computer
user interfaces (e.g., Windows and GNU/Linux desktop users). I am
reminded of Brian Harvey's classic, <i>Computer Science Logo
Style</i>, that many of us C programmers used a guide to Logo-style
thinking. Maybe someone could write a chapter for the Sugar FLOSS
manual</a> on the Sugar style?

4. Sugar look: Christian Schmidt has fleshed out the
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Logo page in the wiki, adding more
colors, SVGs, and some guidelines for use. Also, Jameson Quinn has
been leading an "animated" discussion about using a Sugar Glider as
our mascot. (A Sugar Glider is a "flying" marsupial from Australia.)

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

5. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 will be held at MIT
(Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January.

6. There will be a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer gathering in
Trondheim, Norway 23–25 January 2009 (See
http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2009-01-Trondheim 2009-01).

7. There will be a Python for Teachers workshop at Pycon in Chicago in
late March, 2009.

=== Tech Talk ===

8. SVG performance: When I made the transition from GIF to SVG
rendering in Turtle Art, we took an unacceptable hit in performance.
It has motivated a number of people have jumped in to the discussion
about SVG rendering in Cairo and GTK. Stay tuned for recommendations
on how to tune SVG rendering.

9. Michael Stone and Martin Dengler continue to plug away at C. Scott
Ananian's Journal rebase. Follow the fun at
http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/journal2.

<b> Sugar Labs </b>

10. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-Nov-28-Dec-5-som.jpg).

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org