[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-07-07

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Milan update: Minutes of the Sugar Labs meeting are posted in the
wiki (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Meeting_Minutes-30-06-2008).
Topics covered in the meeting included:
* Governance and the Software Freedom Conservancy
* What are we (Sugar Labs) trying to accomplish?
* Sugar distributions: what are the issues?
* Sugar Labs look and feel: a graphic design review
* Sugar on mobile phones: is it possible? does it make sense?
* Sugar Labs: models of support
* Fund-raising: how much and from whom?

One byproduct of the meeting was further refinement of the Sugar Labs
governance pages in the wiki (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance) and the
accumulation of an initial membership list for Sugar Labs (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/initial_members_list).

2. Intercambio de experiencias (Exchange of experiences): There is
starting to be a nice exchange of classroom experiences among teachers
on the olpc-sur mailing list (in Spanish). Teachers helping teachers.

3. Regional efforts: There are a number of people discussing regional
programs for Sugar development and support. Such programs are in line
with the Sugar Labs vision. It is extremely important to push
development and support into the hands of local organizations because:
(1) it scales; (2) the detailed knowledge is local; (3) it helps the
local economy; (4) it sets in motion independent agencies with a
common goal and yet autonomy of action, which leads to innovation.
Please bring these discussions to the Education mailing list so that
we can leverage each other's ideas.

4. What works? What doesn't?: Roy Zimmermann is working in
collaboration with the World Bank on a USAID-funded project to analyze
the role of ICT on education in developing countries. If you have
examples you think should be included in his survey, please upload
them to www.ictimpact.org.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. India Day: There will be an OLPC Day in India on 4 August in a
venue to be determined. On the agenda is a discussion on learning by
David Cavallo.

===Tech Talk===

6. Development release: Today (Monday, 7 July) is the date for the
next development release. Simon Schampijer asks maintainers to please
provide source code tarballs by the end of the day for the following
modules:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Glucose_Modules
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Fructose_Modules

And to please announce them as explained here:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam#Module_release

7. SocialCalc: KS Preeti has done a thorough review of the latest
release of SocialCalc. Such feedback is enormously helpful to
developers. Please help us by reviewing your favorite Activities and
filing detailed reports either to the wiki or the Sugar list.

8. Gears: David Van Assche continues to make progress on getting
Google Gears running under Sugar.

9. Xterm: Michael Stone posted Blake Setlow's recipe for increasing
the font size in an xterm window:

 LANG=C xterm -fa "DejaVu LGC Sans Mono" -fs 8 +sb

10. Etoys Quickguides: Ted Kaehler reports that the PDF file
containing all of the Etoys QuickGuides is now only 4MB (instead of
22MB) thanks to a suggestion by Tim Falconer (See

11. ReviewBoard: Sayamindu Dasgupta has set up an instance of ReviewBoard at
http://xenguest1.laptop.org/ for exploring. A basic workflow for using
ReviewBoard is available online
(http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/wiki/UserBasics).

12. Misc: Tomeu Vizoso reviewed and pushed out patches this week and
has begun working on Journal object transfer. Marco Pesenti Gritti is
taking a well-deserved vacation. Daniel Drake addressed issues
associated with the Fedora 9 rebase and has some code that brings the
Record activity back into a somewhat usable state.

=== Sugar Labs ===

13. 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-June-28-July-4-som.jpg).

-walter