[IAEP] Funding

[Seth Woodworth]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good question to which there is not a definitive answer yet. The model
> I have been kicking around in my head is to have a small team that
> keeps its focus on top the various infrastructure needs of the
> community and raises money to support community gatherings and such
> incidentals as the filing of trademarks (expensive), etc.

To separate sugarlabs in people's mindshare is going to require some
external funding.

At the very lease I would like to see a few core dev's be able to get
paid, espeically ones who have had a problem ethically with OLPC's
move.  I would hate for these people to be lost.  And I think that you
Walter should probably be funded well enough that you can work at
sugarlabs fulltime.  But I have no idea what you or other developers
are thinking/doing.


> The types of things that need to be worked on (by someone) include
> support for different distributions (and operating systems?), hardware
> platforms, localization, maintenance of existing activities, support
> for new activities, QA, documentation, evaluation, storytelling, etc.
> Some of these things require bootstrapping; some may require dedicated
> resources.


> Should we choose to support just a single distribution, we are going
> to run into distribution wars both on the community and on the
> deployment side, so we really need to be at a cross-distribution
> level, which is where we are heading, but this is a lot to ask of an
> all volunteer community.

Agreed.  I almost think that sugarlabs needs funding outside of
distributors? Someone who's interested, but not necessarily dependent
on one implementation of Sugar

> I can imagine there would be a need for Sugar consultants--both
> technical and pedagogical--but it is not clear that Sugar Labs needs
> to be more than a clearinghouse for such services.


I could see US schools wanting to implement Sugar in a computer lab.
While right now this is something that we want anyone to be able to
do.  Many school districts I'm sure would just hire someone to do it.