[IAEP] Sugar Labs mission statement.

[David Farning]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 19:05 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 6:45 PM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> > As we go forward with Sugar Labs, it is important that we clearly define
> > our mission and goals.  Going through the mailing list archives I have
> > come up with the following Mission Statement:
> >
> > Sugar Labs is an open source community, whose projects are focused on
> > building an educational platform based on the principles of
> > collaboration, reflection, discovery.  Sugar Labs is a not-for-profit,
> > member supported corporation that helps cultivate both an open source
> > community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.
> 
> Not bad. We will have to make it explicit if we also want to take
> corporate and foundation donations, sell products, or anything else in
> that line. I recommend at least shirts and coffee mugs.

'Not-for-profit member supported corporation' covers the donations
issues.  The form of the donation does not matter.   It can be
engineering resources, equipment, or cash.

A not-for-profit is able to sell items.  Issues don't arise until the
sale of those items becomes a significant portion of the NFP's
business. 

> What do you think the ecosystem will consist of, and how do you want
> to work with it?

In my mind the ecosystem is any organization or individual that
functions together with Sugar Labs.

Currently, that involves
* System integrators such as OLPC.
* Distributors such as Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu.
* Upstreams such as Gnome.
* Hardware Vendors.
* Software developers.

In the future that can be:
* Software Vendors.
* Consultants who help deploy sugar to schools and classrooms.
* ....

> I am thinking of organizations (including microfinance institutions)
> for providing the electricity and Internet bandwidth to make XOs work
> in villages, for  redesigning curricular and textbooks around the new
> hardware and software capabilities for collaborative discovery and so
> on, and for preparing the way for economic growth.

>From my current perspective, microfinance institutions, electricity and
Internet bandwidth are beyond the direct scope of Sugar Labs.  They
would be very welcome additions to the ecosystem.

dfarning