[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-11-25

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Sugar Camp Digest: First, I would like to thank Bernie Innocenti
for organizing a great week. He was tireless in his efforts to find us
meeting rooms, maintain the schedule, and help keep things together
when tempers flared—as they will when people are passionate about
their work. Second, I would like to thank the more than 30 people were
able to attend in person and many more who joined by IRC or phone.

Unfortunately, I missed the first half of the meeting due to a
scheduling conflict, but by all [[Sugarcamp/Minutes|reports]] it was a
productive three days.

I joined the group on Thursdsay morning and it was clear that a rhythm
had been established.
* Greg Smith led a useful discussion on how we could work better with
the Sugar deployments (See
[http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/0/0b/Sugar-meeting.odp
Sugar-meeting.odp].
* Caroline Meeks got people excited about her plans to pilot "Sugar on
a Stick" (Sugar on LiveUSB) in a Boston Public School (See
[http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dddknwgs_360gwgwbnf2 Sugar on
a Stick presentation]).
* Brendan Powers talked about the various LTSP deployment approaches
taken by Resara when they work with schools and how Sugar could be
used under these conditions (See
[http://www.resara.com/presentation.ppt Resara.ppt]). Sugar is rapidly
moving into a broader place.
* Ed McNierney led a discussion on the needs of OLPC in the coming
months—he presented a number of challenges, not too many of which the
Sugar community can help with or have much influence over. Reading
between the lines it was clear that OLPC will not directly support
Sugar development itself much longer. We need to acknowledge that as a
community and continue to work with OLPC while seizing the other
opportunities for distributing Sugar that are emerging.

Friday was very up beat and productive.
* Evangeline Harris Stefanakis led a discussion on the use of
portfolios that was inspirational. (I followed up the discussion with
a demonstration of a Sugar portfolio tool I am building—See
[http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/3/36/Portfolios.odp
Portfolios.odp]). The ensuing discussion reminded everyone that Sugar
is "an education project."
* Greg Dekoenigsberg, David Farning, and I then led a discussion about
the current state of Sugar Labs (See
[http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/6/6f/SugarLabsOverview.odp
SugarLabsOverview.odp]). David reviewed the team structure and Greg
then led us in a much-needed marketing exercise to clearly articulate
out vision and goals in just a few sentences (our elevator pitch). One
concrete outcome of the discussion will be the creation of To Do lists
on every team page in the wiki. Please help us populate these lists
with tasks for both newcomers and veteran Sugar contributors.
* C. Scott Ananian gave a rapid-fire talk about collaboration that
highlighted the need and opportunity to make collaboration with
non-Sugar users more facile (See
[http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/talks;a=blob_plain;f=sugarcamp-collab.pdf;hb=HEAD
sugarcamp-collab.pdf]).
* Christian Marc Schmidt and Eben Eliason led a discussion about
future design opportunities for Sugar (See
[http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/081121_sugar_design.pdf
sugar_design.pdf]). We made progress on the Home View, the Journal,
and collaboration.
* Christian also proposed that we create a small static HTML web site
for sugarlabs.org to give a high-level overview of the project and
direct people to appropriate areas of the wiki (See
[[MarketingTeam#Sugar_Labs_website]]).

Saturday, a smaller group met. We continued the marketing discussion,
Bernie gave an overview of the Sugar Labs infrastructure (See
[http://www.codewiz.org/pub/sugar/slides/sugarcamp/SugarLabsInfrastructure.odp
SugarLabsInfrastructure.odp]), and then we discussed the Sugar
Roadmap, coming up with specific milestones (and champions) for the
Sugar 0.84 Release. We focused on stabilization and further
development of key Sugar differentiators such as collaboration, the
Journal, and view source. 0.84 is going to rock! We also did some
brainstorming about how to enhance the collaboration features of the
core Sugar Activities (Fructose)—we'll be soliciting more ideas and
volunteers in coming weeks.

Mel Chua led a wrap-up discussion where we discussed what was awesome,
interesting, and frustrating about Sugar Camp. The awesome list was
lengthy!! To me, seeing the energy and focus of such a talented group
of people gave me confidence that Sugar has real legs. Perhaps the
most actionable frustration is that we didn't do well at soliciting
the ideas and opinions of the less aggressive or more remote members
of the community. It felt as if some important voices are not being
heard; we need that input and feedback. Suggestions as to how we can
do better are welcome.

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

2. FUDCON: The Fedora users conference will be held at MIT on 9–11
January. Stay tuned for details.

=== Tech Talk ===

3. Sugar: Simon Schampijer finished the frame device support for
wireless devices in Sugar. He updated the radio off code in the
control panel to work with NM 0.7 and fixed several small issues in
the mesh code. He fully back ported these changes to sugar-0.82 for
usage in the upcoming F10. With the help of Sayamindu he fixed an
error which was preventing Sugar to start with the Russian locale and
added a log out option to the menu.

Simon also issued the second developer release in the 0.84 cycle
([http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar/sugar-0.83.3.tar.bz2
sugar-0.83.3.tar.bz2] and a new Sugar toolkit
[http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-toolkit/sugar-toolkit-0.83.2.tar.bz2
sugar-toolkit-0.83.2.tar.bz2]). In addition to bug fixing there are
some changes:

* "View source" support. As a fall-back, the source of an Activity is
shown, but this behavior can be overridden, e.g., Browse still shows
the source of the document.
* Sugar now supports setting up a priority list of languages: Not all
programs have translations for all languages. You can create a list of
languages in the Control panel that are used to display messages in
place of a non-existent translation.
* More work has been going into the Sugar support for Network Manager
0.7. We finished the support for wireless devices in the frame,
updated the radio off code in the control panel to work with NM 0.7
and added WPA support.
* Three more activities are now part of Fructose: Image Viewer,
TurtleArt, and Jukebox.

4. Activity activity:

* Pippy-30
* TurtleArt-18
* Map-2.xo
* ImageViewer-4
* Browse-101
* Read-61

=== Sugar Labs ===

5. 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-November-15-21-som.jpg|SOM]]).


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