[IAEP] Purpose of SugarCamp

[David Farning]

We have been having a conversation about what should happen at
SugarCamp.  As we look at what _should_ happen at a SugarCamp, I would
like to keep a couple things in mind.

An opportunity to meet face to face is orthogonal to an opportunity to
make decisions.  In fact, a face to face meeting not a good time to
make decision because such a small subset of the community is present.
 It is a great opportunity to learn things and teach things.  It is a
great time to meet new people and re-meet old friends.  But, it is not
a particularly good decision making venue because of the lack of
transparency.  Decision still happen in the mailing lists and
scheduled meeting.

The Sugar Labs community is not about what we can do for you.  It is
about how Sugar Labs can create a place for _us_ to work together.

I have been recently having a conversation with Yama "The Passionate
Bolivian" Ploskonka about Feria Tecnológica  which is happening the
same weekend in La Paz, Bolivia.  We were discussing how to coordinate
between Bolivia and France with teleconferencing and irc and other
technologies

But, to be honest, I don't think we need to bother with the fancy
technology.  I'm not saying that it would not be _very_ cool to have
jabber.sugarlabs.org running so participates in France can connect
with participants in Bolivia.  What we don't need is to try to
coordinate via teleconference.

The value is in knowing the Chris Ball is in Boston getting Sugar to
run on Fedora, Jonas Smedegaard is in Denmark packaging Sugar on
Debian, Caryl Bigenho is in California spreading the word,  Bryan
Berry is in Nepal establishing a deployment, Yama is in Bolivia
starting a grass root effort.....

The community is _not_ the people meeting in Paris.  The community is
the hundreds of people spread across the globe working to develop and
use Sugar to help kids learn:)

david

david