[IAEP] segregated activities from the sugar platform

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 06:29, David Van Assche<dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>   This may seem like a bit of a premature email, but it comes in
> reference to questions I was asked at the guadalinex offices about
> adding Sugar to their distribution. They mentioned there is a lot of
> freedom as to what content and activitities/applications can be put
> into the distro, but not so much freedom when it comes to marketing,
> naming, base foundations, etc. Thats a shame because the name
> guadalinex really sucks :p

I actually like the name quite a bit ;)

> but its great because they are genuinenly
> interested in running sugar activities in guadalinex.

That's great, but I'm not 100% sure that will benefit Sugar itself.
But happy to give it a try.

> I explained that
> with the move to metacity this would be a possibility in the not too
> distant future (I hope I did not speak out of tone.)

Well, with the metacity move, activities that behave badly in terms of
window sizing will be exposed and we'll be able to fix them. But I
don't think that's one of the biggest issues when running Sugar
activities out of Sugar.

What we need right now is someone to give it a try with a very simple
activity and report back. Then we can identify the first wave of
issues and start working on that.

> There is also the
> very strong likeleyhood that they would use LTSP and iTalc as a method
> of distribution and control. The team I saw was MUCH bigger than I
> expected (a good 300 people working behind computers) and the
> interview process was highly formal, modern and professional. It even
> included a type of psych evaluation, although many of the questions
> were related to my experience in the field (logical) and what kind of
> tech we should be iImplementing today, so that in 5 years time we
> would be in the right playing field. They asked where I saw the distro
> and linux for education being in 5 years, which is an amazingly
> difficult question to answer. In fact, I'd love to hear some of your
> thoughts on that one...

This is interesting, but would benefit from having it's own thread.

> They also wondered how it was possible that I
> would take such a job for so little money, so I guess its not totally
> obvious to many people that tech in education is actually a lot of fun
> and worth being paid less for, than doing some boring sysadmin job
> that really does nothing more than fill the pockets of the company
> being worked for. Anyway, I really hope I get a positive answer soon,
> and when I do, the job they want me to take there is a kind of linux
> ambassador... that is to say, someone who connects up with the
> necesary folk and finds out whats happening and whats worth
> implementing in the land of education and linux...

That's awesome, I bet is hard to convince politicians to fund 300
engineers and at the same time play the upstream/downstream game.
Related interview:

http://www.gnomejournal.org/article/72/working-with-upstream-an-interview-with-laszlo-peter

> One thing is
> relatively sure... Sugar will be running on these roughly 1 million
> computers in one form or another.,.,., So the playing field just got a
> whole lot bigger... in fact, it would mean the xo would suddenly be a
> minority... lol For general information, though this is not very
> known, in sheer numbers, they are the biggest edu linux initiative in
> the world, and have been around for 6 years now. They seem to have
> bypassed many hurdles other such initiatives had and they say their
> schools are generally very happy. But, like all projects, they lack
> content...

We need to help these projects get into contact with each other and
pool resources.

Good luck,

Tomeu

>
> kind regards,
> David (nubae) Van Assche
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>