[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-11-30

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. We celebrated Thanksgiving here in the U.S. this past week. It is a
time for family, food, and what we call "football" in North America.
In my family, I am always tasked with making desserts: pies, cakes,
tarts, and cookies. (This year, I made a pumpkin-praline pie, a pecan
pie--which morphed into a pecan cobbler, a chocolate-mousse pie, a
Key-Lime pie, an apple tart, a fruit tart, hermits, oatmeal cookies,
and a coffee cake. I will share my recipes with anyone who is
interested.)

I cannot remember a time when I wasn't cooking. It has always been an
adventure because I cannot keep a recipe in my head and I cannot
resist experimenting. (I should consider using a laser cutter to print
the recipes on my pies.)  Call it kitchen chemistry or Constructionism
in the kitchen. Either way, it is authentic learning.

2. Simon Schampijer, the Sugar Release Manager, has put together a
detailed set of pages in the wiki outlining our policy
[[http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Policy]] and process
[[http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Feature_Template]] for
proposing new Sugar features. "The main goal of the feature policy is
to make systematic and predictable the process by which community
ideas on how Sugar should evolve get transformed into actionable
proposals."

Simon and I have been discussing the scope of this policy in IRC. It
is appropriate and customary for the Release Manager to set policy,
but I would like to see the process followed more generally, as it
provides a structure that the Activity Team can also leverage as part
of the on-going Sugar activity update process. Activities updates
wouldn't be tied to Sucrose release cycle, but it provides a nice
framework for community feedback and makes clear the roles of
ideation, implementation, and packaging and maintenance.

(For more background on FOSS project development, check out Karl
Fogel's Producing Open Source Software [http://producingoss.com/].)

=== In the community ===

3. Carlos Mauro defended his thesis this week. His topic was
Evaluación de la OLPC con Ingeniería de Usabilidad
[http://unimauro.blogspot.com/2009/11/tesis-evaluacion-de-la-olpc-con.html
].

=== Help Wanted ===

4. Wade Brainerd has observed that while the download counts on
activities.sugarlabs.org are very high, the review counts are very
low. For example, Typing Turtle has nearly 50,000 downloads but only
two reviews. You are encouraged to write reviews. We would especially
like to hear from deployments.

=== In the community ===

5. I'll be giving the keynote at the World Netbook Summit
[http://www.netbookworldsummit.org/ ] in Paris next week.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Simon has refined the Sugar
[[http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/0.88/Roadmap]] A detailed discussion
can be found at
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-November/009421.htm].

7. Aleksey Lim has been leading an interesting discussion on 0install
[[http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Zero_Install_integration]] to
cover situations such as:
* activities that have dependencies that are not included in the Sugar Platform;
* building and installing activity-specific binaries; and
* running non-Sugar applications that are not well packaged in
GNU/Linux distributions.

=== Sugar Labs ===

8. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[http://wiki/sugarlabs.org/go/File:2009-Nov-21-27-som.jpg]]).

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