[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-01-07

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Aleksey Lim has started a discussion
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2010-January/009726.html]
about how to better coordinate—in a more welcoming and friendly
manner—our various development activities with the needs of
deployments. This complements the Luke Faraone's thread
[http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-December/009668.html]
from a few weeks ago about a redesign of the website, based in part
from feedback from the Babson team's study
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Sugar_Deployment_in_US_Schools_Report.pdf]].
The gist of the various conversations is that we need to tackle a
typical Free-Software project issue: how can we make the project more
friendly and accessible to non-technical people; and, related, manage
the explosion of pages, sites, points of view on the project without
limiting expression on the part of individual contributors. Part of
the answer certainly lies in providing a bit more structure to our
website. Part of the answer likely lies in more outreach to where the
non-techies hang out. (I had put together a survey last year for the
teachers in Uruguay to solicit feedback on this topic, but alas, it
was never conducted.) I am not sure we know what are the best channels
for reaching teachers, parents, etc. In any case, it is an important
issue for us. Please contribute to the discussion.

=== In the community ===

2. Bruno Coudoin announced the release of GCompris Version 9.0.
Aleksey is already working on making sure that it is properly packaged
for Sugar and available on http://activities.sugarlabs.org.

3. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Jim Simmons has been working on a
beginner's guide to creating Sugar Activities. He has made great
progress and is at the point where some constructive criticize would
be helpful (Please see
http://en.flossmanuals.net/ActivitiesGuideSugar/Introduction).

=== Help wanted ===

4. David Farning has been working on an Ubuntu-Sugar remix. He is
looking for help with testing. The release can be downloaded from
http://people.sugarlabs.org/dfarning/.

=== Tech talk ===

5. Aleksey has been busy working on Sugar Services
[[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services]]—a
decentralized means of supporting Sugar Activity dependencies. He
announced that the first version is ready to test or use in simple
cases. Please refer to the wiki for more details about Sugar Services
([[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team/Services/Activity_Developers_Guide#Known_issue]],
[[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services#Workflows]],
[[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/Services#What_is_Sugar_Services_not.3F]]).

6. Simon Schampijer has resurfaced the discussion about Resume vs
Start new activity instance from the Home View
(http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2010-January/021771.html).
Please contribute your thoughts and observations from the field.

=== Sugar Labs ===

12. 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-Dec-26-Jan-1-som.jpg|SOM]]).

Happy New Year everyone.

-walter

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