[IAEP] Sad

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Martin Sevior schrieb:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>> 2008/9/16 José Antonio Rocha <joseantoniorocha at gmail.com>:
>>> Don't worry about that. Windows is a dead-SO-walking.
>> Don't think we worry much about Windows around here ;)
>>
>> I think the main concern (and perhaps MS' main interest in all this)
>> is that Sugar is seen as losing its supporters.
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Martin Sevior <msevior at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So the point is that there is a strong counter-story about sugar-labs
>> and the current shipments. We need to make sure that story gets out
>> too.

My thoughts exactly. In fact we spent a lot of time discussing this very 
topic at FUDCon the other weekend...

>>
>> What kind of counter-story could be seen by "journals" as equally compelling?
>>
> 
> There are several I can think of:
> 
> 1. Currently shipping 55 K/month

I'm not sure whether playing the number game is the best way to go 
here... I assume Microsoft is selling quite a bit more XP licenses to 
schools around the world every month, "showing the broad desire to run a 
universal tool" (as marketing would put it).

> 2. Reports from the field

Do we have those?

> 3. New version of sugar+activities about to hit the streets

I'm on it, hope to kick off a new loose series of postings on olpcnews 
called "Sugar Spotlight" where I want to highlight advances in Sugar, 
new activities, etc. But it all takes time and there's only so much I 
can do so help here would be much appreciated!

> 4. Continuous improvements via Open Source projects

"Windows XP is proven on hundreds of millions of machines, we don't need 
to improve it!"

Again, what is the story here and where's the competitive advantage 
compared to Windows XP?

Once we have a hundred teams of programmers, educators and artists 
working on cool activities we can talk about leveraging the concept of 
open source and community. Alas we're not there (yet) so we seriously 
need to start talking about outreach to relevant communities, 
organizations (e.g. universities), etc.

> 5. Live CD's with sugar for first world schools

That's something to talk about. But first the Live-CDs have to be 
improved to a state where they "just work". (Does anyone happen to work 
on that at the moment?) See the "Live CD collaboration problem" thread 
from 2 weeks ago to see how painful this still is.

> 6. Sugar on MIPS hardware (that will never happen with windows).

Yeah, and who outside of some hardcore geeks really cares about that? 
This might be a nice story to tell at a Linux conference but I doubt 
it's a selling point when talking to a teacher or an MoE...

> 
> Lots of things to prove that reports of sugars death are greatly
> exaggerated :-)

I apologize if I sound overly harsh but I think we need to do a lot of 
soul-searching and thinking here to come up with a *comprehensive and 
consistent* (something we only have partially at the moment) view of why 
we believe Sugar to be a competitive solution to Windows XP.

In the same sense I think that everyone here understands that the 
current situation brings about some sense of urgency to all of us.

I'd therefore suggest working out two things over the next few days/weeks.

(1) Sugar (Labs) story: what's our elevator pitch, what are the core 
advantages, what does Sugar Labs as an organization to do support and 
nurture Sugar, etc.
(2) organizational road map: we might have a road map for the code but I 
believe we also need a road map for the organization. A (seemingly) easy 
question to start off with is: Where do we want Sugar Labs to stand 6 / 
12 / 24 months from now?

Off to grab some chocolates so I can smile again... (Anyone have ice 
cream for Marco?;-)

Cheers,
Christoph

> 
> Cheers
> 
> Martin
> 
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>> _______________________________________________
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>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
> 
> 

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com