[IAEP] Sugar Labs market analysis

[David Farning]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 4:51 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 17:16, David Farning<dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Isn't Moodle in the same position? What about Skolelinux? Can we learn
> from those projects?

Rather unique, not totally unique:)

Knut, from SkoleLinux, has been one of the people I lean on most
heavily for advice:)  His years with SkoleLinux have given him a very
practical outlook on the technical needs and realities at of schools.
SkoleLinux seems to be more of a product rather than a project base on
building a platform and ecosystem on top of that platform.  This gives
them a rather more limited scope. -- great market awareness and
practicality.

Moodle has done a great job combining education and open source.  By
hosting Moodle on a server, they isolate the interactions between the
technical and education aspects of the project more than SL can.  Also
because Moodle is a server side project, it takes _much_ less effort
on the deployment support side of the project.  -- great education
content and material emphasis.

Now, if we add and learn from:
eclipse - great ecosystem support
fedora - great developer community
firefox - great market penetration

We should be in pretty good shape:)

Note: This list is not meant to imply that other project are not
great!  These five projects have succeed in areas in which I am
interested and hope we can emulate within and around Sugar Labs.

david

> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> 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
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>>
>



-- 
David Farning
Sugar Labs
www.sugarlabs.org