[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-08-21

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. The ''New York Times'' reported on a FailFaire gathering last month
"over drinks and finger food", where MobileActive, "a network of
people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor
through technology", presented a prize for the worst ICT for
Development project. The prize was an OLPC XO laptop, "a program that
MobileActive members regard as the emblem of the failure of technology
to achieve change for the better." ''The Chronicle of Philanthropy''
subsequently picked up on the article: "One Laptop Per Child was
recently laid off some staff members [SIC] after falling far short of
its goal of providing inexpensive laptop computers to tens of millions
of children in the developing world."

I asked Katrin Verclas, a founder of MobileActive, for the evidence
that OLPC was a failure and she said "OLPC was not discussed or
presented at the FailFaire." It seems she has no evidence and yet she
is sufficiently tone-deaf to be unconcerned that her using the XO as
an emblem of failure might be damaging to the effots of the thousands
of people trying to help the millions of children who are using the XO
and Sugar. I would expect better from the ''New York Times'', the
''Chronicle of Philanthropy'', and from an organization that purports
to shed some light on what works/doesn't work in development. I
recommended that Verclas read ''Aristotle and and Aardvark go to
Washington'' as she might learn a few more techniques for character
assassination from Cathcart and Klein.

2. On a positive note, I've archived a short exchange on the #sugar
channel on irc.freenode.net.

 <marcopg> erikos: approve my trivial patch! :) I want to push again
to sugar after so long :)
 <erikos> marcopg: just because you have just one module does not mean
to not need to specify the module anymore!
 <erikos> marcopg: r!
 <erikos> marcopg: welcome back! :)
 <marcopg> erikos haha
 <marcopg> thanks :)

For those of you who a relatively new to Sugar, Marco was a lead
developer on the Red Hat team that worked with OLPC and Pentagram to
develop Sugar. He helped found Sugar Labs but has been missing from
our ranks over the past 12 months due to other obligations. It is
great to have Marco contributing again.

3. Dinko Galetic, Lucian Branescu Mihaila, and Sebastian Dzaillas all
successfully completed their Google Summer of Code projects.
Congratulations and thanks to Google for sponsoring the work and to
their mentors Stefan (Dogi) Unterhauser, Luis Gustavo Lira, Michael
Stone, and Sascha Silbe, and to Tim McNamara for organizing the SUgar
Labs GSoC program.

4. This review was posted on the Physics page on
activities.sugarlabs.org. I had to share it:

> I love it! It's doodling for inventors! I've had so many ideas from this.
> Starting live is the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise it would
> not be obvious what the thing does, silly! Also, stopping time is for
> losers. build stuff on scaffolding, big tall blocks, then delete them
> when everything is pinned, or jointed, just like real life. :-)

===In the community===

5. There is a call for presentations for an on-line global education
conference that may be of interest to the Sugar community (See
http://www.globaleducationconference.com/call-for-presentations.html).

6. There is a comprehensive write up of last week's education summit
at LinuxCon (See
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/mini-education-summit-linuxcon-boston-2010).

===Tech Talk ===

7. We are making great progress towards Sugar 0.90. Follow the fun at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.90 .

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Aug-7-13-som.jpg (61 emails)

Visit http://planet.sugarlabs.org for more updates about Sugar and
Sugar deployments.

-walter


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