[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-05-19

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest ===

1. I'm back from an exhilarating weekend in Paris, where we celebrated
the one-year anniversary of the founding of Sugar Labs: Saturday was
the OLPC France meeting at La Cantine and Sunday was Sugar Camp at La
Ruche—both venues a short walk from my cousin's flat near République.

The OLPC France meeting, attended by about 50 people, gave us a chance
to network with some old friends and colleagues and build some new
connections that will further enhance the Sugar community. For
example, Tomeu Vizoso, Bernie Innocenti, and I had a chance to spend
time with Bruno Coudoin; we discussed various ways we can improve upon
the GCompris integration into Sugar. It was also great to finally meet
in person Sugar contributors such as Gary Martin, Sache Silbe, David
Van Assche, and Marten Vijn. It was also great that Marco Presenti
Gritti was able to attend. The day was broken up into a number of
parallel workshops, with a overall focus on deployment needs. Many of
us never left the coffee bar, where there was continuous conversation.
Kudos to Bastien Guerry and Lionel Laske for organizing a great day at
a great venue and bringing together such interesting people.

About one half of the Saturday attendees came to Sugar Camp on Sunday.
Sean Daly organized the day; he provided his flat for an urban camping
experience for the attendees and found a great venue overlooking the
canal on Quai de Jemmapes. We didn't have preset agenda topics, rather
we spend the first hour using SCAMPER to expand our thinking about
potential discussion topics (See
[[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-05-11]]). From the four
topics I had listed as a seed to the discussion, we generated almost
50 ideas. We then used a variant of PPCo to define four topics for the
day, which we labeled: Sugar Roadmap, Packaging Sugar, Marketing
Roadmap, and the School Experience. Within each group, we iterated
upon the process to generate working groups that would be tasked with
coming up with tasks and deliverables. (I'll be posting the meeting
notes as soon as the group secretaries send them my way.)

There have been several posting regarding Sugar Camp from the
perspectives of the various attendees, e.g., David Farning's
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005730.html] and
Sean's [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-May/001009.html]
posts. There was very positive feedback regarding the creativity
process—we stretched ourselves and enriched the discussion as a
result. And of course, it was great to spend time together. The
downside was that we were not at all successful in engaging the online
community in the process—in part due to technical difficulties (a
flaky network) and in part by not have a good sense of how to do it.
This is something we should work on in advance of the next gathering,
which will likely be at LinuxTag in Berlin. Another downside was that
we really could have used another day or two to go into more depth on
some topics, particularly technical themes. A codefest as a follow-up
to the weekend would have been ideal.

(There are photos from both days
[http://www.flickr.com/search/?d=taken-20090515-&q=sugarcamp&m=text]
and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/50394334@N00/] and
[http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/pictures/conf/Sugar_Camp_Paris_2009].)

2. Tomeu, Marco, Bastian, and I formed one of the afternoon working
groups. Our goal was to come up with some concrete suggestions
regarding telling the Sugar story. We decided to start off with
something pretty basic: the generation of more screencasts of Sugar
from a wide variety of viewpoints, e.g., developers, teachers,
students, etc. Both Chris Ball and the MediaMods team had written
screencast activities
[http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/Screencast-1.xo] that would
merit some TLC. Meanwhile, Bastian helped my get xvidcap running on my
machine (an HP laptop running Ubuntu Jaunty) so that I could make
videos from sugar_jhbuild:

 sudo apt-get install xvidcap

You can run xvidcap from within Sugar itself from the Terminal
activity or, perhaps easier in the context of sugar_jhbuild, run it in
parallel with Sugar.

I made a test video
[http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs/video/15676869] of the xo-color
activity and posted the results to dailymotion.com with tags such as
"Sugar" and "activity". I plan on creating a wide range of videos,
showing everything from running activities to installing them to
debugging them. Let's try to flood Dailymotion with great Sugar
stories. (BTW, Dailymotion will automatically convert videos to OGG so
that they will run within Sugar without the need for proprietary
codecs.) Sebastien Adgnot has already set up
[http://olpc.dailymotion.com], an OLPC channel and will make a Sugar
channel available as well.

===Help Wanted===

3. We need your Sugar stories.

===In the community===

4. The next Ceibal Jam [http://ceibaljam.org] in Uruguay will be in
two weeks (30 May and 6 June at the University of Montevideo).
Programmers are invited, but also designers, educators, artists, and
anyone who wants work in the design, content, programming and testing
activities new or improvement of existing activities. Who is coming
from SugarLabs?

===Tech Talk===

5. Chris Ball announced on behalf of OLPC that they have decided to
base the software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. They
plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (The
new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough
room for both environments at once.)

6. Chris also announced that Build 8.2.1-802 will be the final 8.2.1
Release for the OLPC XO-1 hardware (See
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1] and
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1#Upgrade_instructions]).

7. James Simmons has offered some good advice regarding "Creating Your
First Sugar Activity."
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005663.html]

===Sugar Labs ===

8. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-May-som-9-15.jpg]]).

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