[IAEP] deployment focused event

[David Farning]

Following up on the 'realness' event happening later this month, we
will be holding a deployment focused event in July to prepare Sugar
for deployment in Maine.

Last summer Sugar Labs spent a significant amount of resources, both
real and emotional, on a pilot at the GPA.  Now, a year later and
hopefully a year smarter we are going to take another run at a US
based deployment.  This time the deployment will be part of the Maine
1-to-1 program.

Lessons learned:
1) Hardware is hard -- At the GPA project we spent too much time
dealing with hardware issues.  This time we will partner with the
Maine 1-to-1 program.  They have successfully deployed 3000 laptops in
middle and high schools in Maine.  We will leverage their hardware and
deployment expertise by adding Sugar to their existing program and add
adding elementary schools to their target audience.

2) Don't expect a community to deal with deployment specific bugs --
on the deployment's timeline.  The open source development model
brings many advantages when creating an open learning platform.
Customer service is not one of those advantages.  As many of you may
have notice, there has been an uptick in the number of deployment
specific patches flowing upstream to Sugar Labs over the last couple
of weeks.  With Bernie's help, I have been sponsoring several local
developers to fix usability issues for the Paraguay deployment.  The
effort has had the twin benefits of fixing issues in Paraguay and
gradually acclimating the upstream developers at Sugar Labs to deal
with patches from deployments.  I will continue this effort by
sponsoring developers to do customer service for the Maine deployment
so Sugar Labs can focus on being upstream.

If anyone is interesting is learning more about this particular
approach to supporting a deployment I invite you to join us at
http://www.fossed.com/ .

david