[IAEP] Community Road Map

[David Farning]

After letting Walter's vision statement [1] for Sugar Labs in 2009
ferment for a couple of weeks, I though it was time to start plotting
out a high level community road map for making his vision a reality.

Walter's two main vision statements were:
1.  Grow Sugar Labs.
2.  Sugar is only useful in the hands of students.

Last year, as a community Sugar Labs focused on getting started.  Our
roadmap [2] was crude but effective.

Sugar Labs evolved into a community lead project and legal organization.
Sugar Labs established a release cycle to coordinate developer efforts
and communicate with the larger Sugar ecosystem.
Sugar Labs built a stable infrastructure to support the community.

The biggest missing piece was deployment support.  We just didn't have
the resources to focus on deployments yet.

This year, three possible areas of focus are:
1. Distribution and support
2. End user experience
3. Activities and content

Distribution and support will involve actively encouraging
distributions, hardware manufactures, and independent software vendors
to work with and become part of the Sugar Labs community and
ecosystem.

There are four specific ways of encouraging distribution and support:
1.  Push Sugar down the distribution chain.
2.  Pull feedback back up the distribution chain.
3.  Encourage users to pull Sugar down the distribution chain.
4.  Encourage users to push feedback up the distribution chain.

End user experience will involve making Sugar move valuable and usable
for end users. At the end of the day, Sugar will not become a common
fixture in schools until teachers and school administrators feel that
using Sugar is easier and more effective than other teaching tools.

Some ideas:
1.  Teach educators how to use Sugar.
2.  Improve stability and feature of Sugar.
3.  Localize Sugar, activities, and contents for specif regions and languages.

Activities and content development is where the rubber hit the road.
Sugar is a lot like a browser in that most people don't use a browser
just for the sake of the browser.  Instead, we us a browser to look at
and access content.  Students with use Sugar look at and interact with
activities and content.

Here a couple of ambitious yet achievable concrete high level goal.
1. $100,000US Budget.
2. 1000 Activities with more than 1000 download.
3. Sugar manual available in 10 languages.

I would like to encourage individual teams to consider how they can
work the above goals into their team roadmaps.

david

1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-03-17
2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Roadmap