[IAEP] Sugar Labs market analysis

[David Farning]

Fred Grose has started an interesting wiki page at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Sugar_Labs/Roadmap discussing the
Sugar Labs roadmap.  One of the interesting parts of that page is the
discussion about 'what is FLOSS?'  In particular it highlights the
communication challenges between participates in a project which
crosses the Technology - Education barrier.

Sugar Labs is in rather unique position.

The project bridges the gap between software and education using
collaborative development methodologies.

On the plus side:

1.  Both software development and education have strong histories of
community supported successes stories.  You just need to look to your
local PTA and youth sports leagues to see the passion that interested
parents have in their children's development.  One the software side,
the existence and success of projects like Linux and Fire Fox prove
that community driven software development _can_ work.

2. The vision and mission of Sugar Labs is extremely compelling to
both groups.  Many developers are intrigued by the possibility of
creating a great tool to help kids learn.  Educators are interested in
leveraging new technologies to improve their ability to teach.

On the negative side:

1. There are some pretty big cultural and language gaps between the
two groups which we will have to merge.  On the talk page mentioned
above, it looks like Fred, wearing his developer hat, uses the acronym
FLOSS to be synomyous with 'community driven, freely available, openly
developed.'  Caroline, wearing her educator hat, asks why is it a FLOS
_SOFTWARE_ project?  I hope they both mean 'Sugar Labs the community
driven education project which leverages open source software
development techniques and methodologies... :)

2. There is no established market for computers in the early childhood
education market.

- aside -

Market is a very overloaded word in business and economics.  At one
level it can refer simply to customers.  On a second level. A market
is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions,
procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons
trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the
economy.

- end aside -

There is no established market for computers in early childhood
education for a number of reasons.  It has not yet proven financially
viable for existing software or hardware vendors to build a business
in the market.  Existing software and hardware vendors are willing and
able to 'drive out' individual smaller competitors who threaten their
existing markets.

Not only does Sugar Labs need to build the sugar product, we need to
either build or encourage others to build markets around Sugar.

This leaves Sugar Labs with three simultaneous challenges; creating
technical solutions, creating educational solutions, and creating the
market.  How hard can that be:)

david

-- 
David Farning
Sugar Labs
www.sugarlabs.org