[IAEP] Distribution Roadmap

[David Farning]

'To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners
everywhere'

This is Sugar Lab's first education goal. It is an ambitious yet worthy
goal. We are making progress towards this goal.

To help get my mind around the issues, I have split the work into four
phases: planning, packaging, partnering, and placing. Even if we have the
most pedagogically sound and technically correct platform, we have nothing
until Sugar is in the hands of students.

Before I get ahead of myself, this discussion does not ignore OLPC, rather
it focuses on growing the users and developers beyond OLPC.

Phase 1. Planning

The first phase is planning and communicating. Sugar Labs needed to increase
it's development transparency, making it easier for our partners to develop
with us and build on top of the Sugar platform. Marco has been doing good
work on a road map and establishing a release cycle.

This is not something that we necessarily get right on the first try:( By
working together Sugar Labs, OLPC and our other partners will improve the
process.

Phase 2. Packaging.

The second phase is packaging. Sugar Labs needed to reduce the barrier to
entry to test and use Sugar. Greg and his team have been getting Sugar
prepared on Fedora. Jonas has been shouldering the load at Debian. Morgan,
Luke and James have been getting Sugar ready to ship on Ubuntu.

We are a few weeks away from Fedora based liveCDs and liveUSBs. Ubuntu will
follow when some abi-word version issues are resolved.

We have still have a way to go before Sugar is available on all desktops.
Our next step in the packaging phase is to work on the server side

Phase 3. Partnering

The third phase is partnering. Sugar Labs needs to partner with existing
open source in education projects. Some of the most successful projects are
SkoleLinux, a Debian based project that has had good penetration in Northern
Europe. In the next few months they will be join Linex , a distribution
which originated in the Extremadura region of Spain. K12Linux, formally know
as k12LTSP, is base on the Linux Terminal Server Project. Edubuntu is
Ubuntu's education projects.

There are many other project that are either regionally based, distribution
based, or hardware based.

The biggest advantage of partnering is our ability to leverage their
existing marketing, customer support, and feedback processes.

Phase 4. Placing

The end goal is placing Sugar in front of students. Realistically, I think
we are six months away from non-OLPC turn-key deployments. In the meantime,
we need to start developing a network of early adopters and technically
proficient teachers to pull us forward.

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If anyone is interested in helping we could use your time, skills, and
energy.

As always suggestions and criticizes are welcome


thanks
david
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