[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-07-22

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest===

1. There were some remarks made about Sugar by Nicholas Negroponte in
ZDNET earlier this week that have caused a stir in the community. It
is remarkable (to me) that there is still such confusion between
operating systems (GNU/Linux) and user interfaces (Sugar) even in the
minds of industry insiders. Rather than revisiting the SlashDot debate
or the discussion on dev.laptop.org
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-July/025121.html], I
refer you to an article that María del Pilar Sáenz R. has written on
Sugar and the use of Free Software
[http://www.archive.org/download/SugarUsandoSoftwareLibreParaAprender/sugar.pdf].

I also recall one of my first experiences working with Nicholas in the
1970s. At the time there was no widespread use of personal computers;
at MIT, we mostly worked on the MULTICS  (Multiplexed Information and
Computing Service) time-sharing operating system. Various labs had
expensive computers, often leased or purchased as part of a government
research grant; they took great care to monitor computer usage--every
cycle was accounted for so that the appropriate research account could
be billed. There was one lab on campus which did not monitor computer
usage, the Architecture Machine Group. As I understood it, Nicholas
did not think that charging for computer time was sympathetic with its
creative use. As a consequence, ''anyone'' at MIT who had an idea that
they wanted to explore would hang out ArcMac. Access and freedom to
explore and express led to a vibrant, inventive learning community.

2. In the wow category, from Alan Kay: "Two girls, ages 8 and 4 win
programming contest in Singapore. Using that oddly unused in IAEP
resource [Etoys] that just happens to be part of the Sugar distro."
[http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_405695.html]

===Help wanted===

3. I put out a call for help with our Election Committee a few weeks
ago. We need to hold an election for the Oversight Board in August. So
far, I have gotten no volunteers. It is not appropriate that I run the
election, as I am a member of the Board. It is not a lot of work, but
it should be done a community member.

If you are interested in being a candidate, please add your name to
the list in the wik.
[[Sugar_Labs/Governance/Oversight_Board/2009-2010-candidates]]

===In the community===

4. Sebastian Dziallas, who has been active in the Fedora education
SIG, is looking for testers for the Fedora  POSSE
[http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2009] remix
[http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/remixes/POSSE/POSSE-Education-1.iso].
(POSSE is a Red Hat-sponsored summer program to introduce university
professors to the FOSS way of software development.) The remix
includes a ready-to-go development environment for contributing to
educational projects and getting-started resources for contributing to
a number of projects including Fedora, Mozilla, Sugar Labs, and KDE
Education. It can be used by individuals or by teachers, students, and
classrooms that want to contribute to FOSS projects as part of their
course efforts.

===Sugar Labs===

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:File:2009-July-11-17-som.jpj]]).

-walter

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