[Dextrose] [AC Update] We are what we do.

[David Farning]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dextrose-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:dextrose-
> bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sebastian Silva
> Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 11:18 PM
> To: dextrose at lists.sugarlabs.org; team
> Subject: [Dextrose] [AC Update] We are what we do.
> 
> We are what we do. We love what we do.
> 
> This is my vision with regard to Activities which I hope to help make a
reality
> by working with Activity Central.
> 
> Activities are core to Sugar's success. They are an opportunity to make
Sugar
> not only an excellent scaffold for young hackers but also a great user
> experience.
> 
> We've learned that we need a workflow to successfully manage a number of
> activities. We need to make it simple to deploy and update collections of
> activities accross different deployment scenarios.
> 
> After patching a number of activities I wanted to test them, but came up
with
> no simple way to deploy them across my laptops / virtual machines.
> 
> Hunting for git repositories and then for mantainers made me wish each
> Activity had an "About" pane maybe with options like "Report bug", "View
> Source". "Git clone". Also a "Mantainer" field on it.
> 
> I think we should consider activity developers in a very real sense like
"users"
> of Sugar. Programming is as joyful as it is powerful but we could really
work
> on making the workflow an integrated experience. We have such wonderful
> tools but few can really keep up with them all. If we streamline and
> document certain workflows we may catalyst the availibility and quality of
> our Activity Library.
> 
> "About pane" has a psychological effect, it provides recognition and maybe
a
> sense of ownership for developers and mantainers. I will propose it on
sugar-
> devel and the HIG once I've implemented a design. Also it gives a starting
> point for eventually getting involved in the development and improvement
> of each activity.

[David Farning] 
+1 The about/credits pane is critical to the ecosystem.
 
> The dream of Sugar is to further blur the line between the user and the
> developer. Consumer and producer. In this I resonate with Silbe's argument
> that perhaps we should be using Sugar ourselves. Particularly for Activity
> Developers, I believe this is the case.
> 
> But we are far from this overall vision at this point.
> At this point we're getting the hang of the current workflows and tools
for
> producing what we are ambitiously calling "Dextrose Activity Pack" which
we
> plan to start deploying in Anish's testing round in Paraguay (see
> http://openetherpad.org/EL5g7TqHEI ).

[David Farning] 
Excellent list. For a bit of background into the purpose behind the list.
This Activity Pack consists of the most frequently used Activities with
which Activity Central work. The purpose of the list is resource allocation.
Activity Central's goal is for the AC Activities Team to spend 80% of our
time on activities we have rated high and 20% of  the activities we have
rated medium.
 
> The general idea is to improve the activities but also to help developers
make
> activities great. This would be true success.
> 
> For this they need iteration. Fix, test, deploy. Repeat. Polish.

Internally the AC mantra is Feedback, Fix, Finished Product.
1. Get feedback from users. Students, teachers, Foradores, and technical
support staff.
2. Fix the issues.
3. Bundle the fixes in a Finished Product that is easily distributed to
laptops.

> Peru
> 
> Activity Central is providing consulting and custom development as a way
to
> support Escuelab's incursion in native communities of Lima (Shippibo) and
> Puno (Aymara) for shooting a documentary. I'm helping Neokinok.tv use the
> XO's to record and then collect all videos to a server. For this I'm
patching File
> Share Activity and maybe Record. My idea is to avoid doing a one-time hack
> but to try and make the procedure as simple as possible and document it so
> maybe it is replicable. Suggestions welcome.
> 
> They're also planning a translation marathon to complete Sugar translation
to
> Aymara and Quechua, for which Rafael's pootle work will be invaluable.
Here
> are some links:
> http://escuelab.org/contenido/amtawi
> http://experimentaltv.org/xotv
> http://shuawa.org/content/xotv
> http://sites.google.com/site/olpcdrepuno/ (drep puno = direccion regional
> de educación) http://openetherpad.org/requerimientos-neokinok-escuelab
> 
> Saludos,
> icarito

Excellent. Will you be able to attend? Otherwise can you and Rafael assign a
contact person at the event to act as a go liaison between you two and the
people doing the translations? At these types of events it is very useful to
have a appointed technical person on hand to help translators.

david