[IAEP] [ANNOUNCE] Ballot information for 2011-2012 Sugar Labs election

[Christoph Derndorfer]

FWIW I haven't received my ballot e-mail yet. 

(Just throwing it out there early on because last time around at least a couple of different people had this issue.) 

Christoph

Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> schrieb:

>Hi all,
>
>The candidate list has closed; I'm sending out ballots over the next
>hour. All registered members should receive emails from
><team[AT]selectricity.org> with a subject like:
>	[Sugar Labs Oversight Board Election 2011-2012] Election Begun!
>
>Please check your spam folders! On occasion these mails get caught in
>spam filters. Your email from the voting software contains the link to
>the election; this URL is unique to you and should not be shared.
>
>The election will end at Wed Nov 30 00:00:00 -0500 2011.
>
>== Candidate Information ==
>
>There are 7 candidates for 3 seats. They are listed at
><http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/2011-2012-candidates?oldid=71296>,
>and below:
>
> * Gerald Ardito
> * Walter Bender
> * Sridhar Dhanapalan
> * Nick Doiron
> * David Farning
> * Chris Leonard (cjl)
> * Laura Victoria Vargas
>
>Position statements from each candidate as indicated on the
>aforementioned page follow.
>
>=== Gerald Ardito ===
>
>I believe Sugar Labs is an amazing enterprise. Miraculous, even.
>It is a place where people from all over the world are working together
>to empower learning for children everywhere.
>
>And the world of these people is outstanding. In just a few short years,
>they have developed an operating system and hundreds of
>applications/activities. And all of them are free and open source, and
>modifiable by their users.
>
>Sugar Labs is also a community. And it is a community, I believe, that
>is also free and open source. A community of people who are also, in a
>manner of speaking, free and open source. I am thinking, especially, of
>the regional versions of Sugar Labs, where developers and others have
>come together to the serve the unique needs of a particular region.
>And so, Sugar Labs, like any other enterprise, is a collection of
>conversations. I would very much like to be a part of this conversation
>as a SLOB member.
>
>Here are my relevant qualifications. I have been managing a deployment
>of XO Laptops for the last 2 1/2 years in a New York middle school,
>working with 5th grade students and their teachers. This work formed the
>basis of my doctoral dissertation research, which I completed in May
>2010. I have also consulted with other teachers and schools on the use
>of XO Laptops and Sugar with their teachers and students. In the Winter,
>I will be working with three Navajo elementary schools in New Mexico.
>
>I sometimes feel that educators and students (at least in the United
>States) are under-represented in the various discussions around Sugar. I
>believe my experience could help to close this gap.
>I look forward to what comes next.
>
>=== Walter Bender ===
>
>My position on the board is expiring. After giving it some thought, I
>will be throwing my hat into the ring. My rationale is that while Sugar
>Labs has made great progress over the past three years, it still needs
>shepherding, particularly in regard to maintaining its focus—too often
>expediency takes precedent over consideration for the learner. The
>local-lab program is starting to finally take off, but it too needs some
>further shaping. And while there are numerous commercial entities taking
>interest in Sugar, our volunteer community remains at the heart of Sugar
>Labs—I plan to continue to advocate on behalf of the Sugar contributors.
>By way of example, it is the volunteer community that is leading the
>effort to migrate Sugar to GNOME 3.0.
>
>For those of you who don't know me, here is a bit of background. I am
>formerly the director of the MIT Media Lab. I took a leave of absence
>from MIT to found One Laptop per Child with Nicholas Negroponte in 2006.
>I left OLPC in 2008 to establish Sugar Labs as an independent entity.
>(At the time, Nicholas had taken the position that Sugar was "the
>problem" preventing him from selling more laptops. I was of the opinion
>that what the children did with the laptops was more important than the
>hardware. Ironically, but not surprisingly, OLPC continues to ship Sugar
>with every laptop that they distribute.) At Sugar Labs, I wear many
>hats: I am the developer or maintainer of numerous Activities, including
>Turtle Art, Abacus, Portfolio, Measure, Dimensions, etc.; I contribute
>to the Sugar toolkit—most recently, the enhancements to the View Source
>mechanism; and the occasional patch to Sugar itself; I am an active
>member of the Design Team; the Activity Team; and the Learning Team. I
>was the principal author of the Sugar FLOSS Manual. When I am not
>writing code, I am advocating on behalf of Sugar Labs and helping out
>with deployments by running seminars and workshops for teachers and
>engineers. My blog about Sugar is aggregated at http://planet.sugarlabs.org.
>
>=== Sridhar Dhanapalan ===
>
>The easiest way to find out about me is to visit my Web site
>[http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/about/].
>
>Amongst a vari­ety of Free and Open Source Software con­tri­bu­tions
>since the 1990s [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SridharDhanapalan], I have
>pre­vi­ously been a board mem­ber of Linux Aus­tralia and Pres­id­ent of
>the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG). I have given presentations at
>various events includ­ing linux.conf.au, OSDC, SLUG, Soft­ware Free­dom
>Day and Doc­u­ment Free­dom Day.
>
>For nearly two years I have served full-time as OLPC Australia's
>Engineering Manager, liaising between developers and educators to ensure
>that we are able to satisfy requirements on the ground. My team at OLPC
>Australia take this very seriously, to the point of extending OLPC's
>core principles with two of our own
>[http://www.laptop.org.au/vision/core-principles]:
>* Empowering Teachers
>* Community Engagement
>
>In my day-to-day work, I am in constant contact with schools,
>communities, governments and other relevant bodies. I have developed an
>appreciation for Sugar as much more than software - it is a platform
>that supports education, community and culture. Everything we build is
>done so in consultation with educators and other stakeholders, in
>consideration of the whole picture. For instance, the operating system
>that we carry on our XOs
>[https://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/xo-au/wiki/List_of_improvements_in_XO-AU_builds_2010-2011]
>was developed in tandem with our certification system
>[http://edu.laptop.org.au/laptop/xo-cert-course].
>
>I am proud to say that our approach has shown tremendous success
>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO-VNhgZLDw]. You can read our Policy
>Document [http://edu.laptop.org.au/laptop/policy-document] to gain a
>full appreciation of our programme.
>
>As a Sugar Labs Oversight Board member, I aim to bring this same kind of
>holistic approach to guiding Sugar. My strength is in using my extensive
>Free Software experience to meet real needs on the ground. I strongly
>believe that for Sugar to grow, it needs to have strong representation
>from all stakeholders, including deployments.
>
>Our contributions to Sugar have been numerous. We have extended the OLPC
>XS Schoolserver with our XS-AU
>[https://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/xs-au/wiki], creating a far more
>flexible collaboration solution. We have partnered with Activity Central
>to develop many improvements for the platform. These are currently being
>tested in Dextrose developer builds, and will be upstreamed in the near
>future.
>
>While it's all well and good to speak about past achievements, it's
>important as a Board member to have a vision for the future. We need to
>broaden the developer and user base. We need to make it simpler to
>access Sugar.
>
>On the developer side, we should embrace
>[http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2011/06/20/why-free-and-open-matters/]
>Web [http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2011/06/23/html5-in-sugar/]
>standards and allow activities to be created in HTML5. We are working
>[https://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/742] on that.
>
>On the user side, I'd like Sugar to be made available on more devices. I
>am encouraged by the work being made to port Sugar to GTK+ 3. This will
>lay the groundwork for Sugar on tablets, such as the XO-3. We need to
>think ahead to ensure longevity of the Sugar platform and mission.
>
>=== Nicholas Dorion ===
>
>My interest in Sugar began when I received a G1G1 XO laptop. From my
>dorm room, I started fixing bugs and then hacking new features for Sugar
>activities. Since then, I have worked for two months each with the
>Kasiisi Project in Uganda and Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, and I am presently
>halfway through another two-month deployment in Haiti. I have helped
>represent our community at Maker Faire NYC, OpenStreetMap's 2011
>conference, and Tech at State. If you have visited http://olpcMAP.net, a
>website I co-founded, or have read a post from my blogs,
>http://MapaDelSur.blogspot.com and http://MapUganda.blogspot.com , I
>hope that it made you feel better connected to the teachers and students
>using Sugar around the world.
>
>I would appreciate your support for my next phase of volunteering with
>Sugar: serving on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.
>
>I believe that my experiences teaching Sugar in Uganda and Haiti, and my
>development work with Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, would help me provide
>valuable input to the board's decisions. As a 2012 Code for America
>fellow -
>http://codeforamerica.org/2011/10/13/meet-code-for-america-2012/ - I
>will be working closely with city governments to find open-source
>solutions to common problems. As I see it, Sugar Labs is a major player
>in the development of open education, but should take further steps to
>cover traditional math and science disciplines. My recent work on
>Memorize with Sensors, Mapa Ceibal, and Crikey (a modified Measure
>activity) are my endeavours to make this possible without losing our
>engaging constructionist ideals.
>
>=== David Farning ===
>
>As a member on the original Sugar Labs Oversight Board, I came to feel
>that as much as I believed in the vision of OLPC and Sugar Labs there
>were a number of needs in the ecosystem which could be met by a third
>organization.
>1. The voice and needs of deployments were being over shadowed by the
>global voice of Sugar Labs and OLPC.
>2. There was no organization provide service and support for
>deployments. As a result, deployments required a significant amount of
>technical sophistication before they could get started.
>3. Because of the volunteer nature of Sugar Labs, developers tended to
>work on the interesting and innovative problems rather than the daily
>grind necessary to deliver a fully polished educational platform.
>
>For the past two years I, and a number of other developers, have been
>establishing Activity Central [1] to help fill the above needs. Our
>model is to provide technical service and support to deployments. This
>effort has resulted in the Dextrose [2] operation system which we
>custom develop and support for several large and small deployment.
>Because we depend on customer revenue for our sustainability we have a
>strong incentive to meet the software needs of deployments.
>
>Because Dextrose is based on Upstream Sugar and OLPC OS releases
>Activity Central has a strong incentive to assist in the continued
>success of Sugar Labs and OLPC. To this end we have made a number of
>commitments:
>
>1. All code written by Activity Central developers will be released
>with an open source license.
>2. Activity Central developers spend 60% of their time on revenue
>generating work. They are free to spend the remaining 40% of their
>time on projects which are of general value to the ecosystem.
>3. Activity Central supports a Community Architect whose job is
>identify and support local and global communities that are valuable
>parts of the Sugar Labs and OLPC ecosystem.
>
>From time to time I am asked why I chose to form a third organization
>rather than work within Sugar Labs or OLPC. A third global
>organization brings several advantages to the ecosystem:
>
>1. It promotes cooperative decision making.  When the ecosystem
>consisted of two primary participants, Sugar Labs and OLPC, there was a
>tendency for competitive decision making. When a third player was
>added to the mix, the value of cooperative decision making become more
>apparent.
>2. Organizations with a business focus often provide value to a Free
>Software ecosystem. Interestingly OLPC-A has seen this and has been
>shifting toward a 'social entrepreneurship' model.
>3. Activity Central approaches the ecosystem from a different
>viewpoint than either sugar Labs or OLPC. As global innovators both
>Sugar Labs' and OLPC's strengths are top down. Ideas and
>Implementations flow down from the central organization to deployments
>and users. As a service provider, most of Activity Central's ideas and
>implementation flow up from deployments and user. Our work flow is to
>solve issues faced by individual deployments which we generalize and
>push upstream.
>
>
>=== Chris Leonard ===
>
>I have decided to stand as a candidate for election to the Sugar Labs
>Oversight Board.
>
>Since placing my G1G1 order on the first day of availability back in
>2007, I've been very interested in learning how I could contribute to
>the goals of the education mission articulated by OLPC. With the spin
>out of Sugar Labs in 2008, I joined as a member of Sugar Labs, but have
>long considered myself to hold "dual-citizenship".
>
>I've worked on many aspects of the effort. In the early days, I did a
>great deal of work on the wikis, earning the medal of the "Order of the
>Mop and Bucket" (wiki admin) and even rising to "b'crat" status. I've
>been a member of the OLPC Support Gang answering help and collaboration
>requests in the OLPC RT system and working to "weave together the
>grassroots". I've also done testing of activities and filed numerous
>bugs in the OLPC, Sugar Labs and Etoys bug trackers, as well as
>performing a lot of ticket clean up of older tickets as a general
>contribution to maintenance. I've explored content development,
>producing a Latin America and Caribbean targeted .xol content bundle
>containing the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in about 100
>languages, including a number of spoken audio versions.
>
>In recent years I've been focusing my efforts on the Localization
>community, working with and then picking up tasks from Sayamindu
>Dasgupta as he made his transition to graduate school and in the process
>took on responsibilities as the Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator.
>In that role I have worked to expand our language coverage and
>facilitate the recruitment and empowerment of members of the
>Localization community that spans Sugar Labs / OLPC and Etoys. I have
>advocated on behalf of improvements in internationalization and
>localization of our products as well as the tools to perform that work.
>I've performed extensive outreach to upstream and downstream efforts to
>improve the overall L10n ecosystem. We now host translation for Gnash
>and AbiWord upstream's as well as the Waveplace downstream. I arranged
>for the Gnome team to provide us with a "release set" to facilitate our
>tracking of the upstream L10n bits we pull from them, as well as
>facilitating upstream contributions by our localizers that will
>ultimately benefit our users.
>
>I'm a frequent presence in the open meetings of the various Sugar Labs
>teams IRC meetings, including the SLOBS meetings and I have advocated
>for attention to the needs of our language communities in those forums
>as well as encouraging collaborative effort among Sugar Labs teams and
>upstream outreach to the wider FOSS community.
>
>I've gained a wide angle view of Sugar Lab's work, as well as having
>delved into excruciating detail in a number of areas. I've had the
>opportunity to work with a broad variety of stakeholders and I hope to
>use this perspective to help Sugar Labs grow it's community and reach it
>goals.
>
>
>=== Laura Vargas ===
>
>Currently working on Sugar Camp Lima 2011.
>
>Starting the century [2000] I graduated as an industrial engineer from
>the Colombian School of Engineering, the same year I began to specialize
>in international business, banking and finance at the University of Rosario.
>
>In 2005 moved to California to study film production [thanks to the
>Ministry of Culture and the Fulbright Commission Colombia] leading on my
>return the local production team of the film "Love in the Time of Cholera".
>
>In Bogotá I became part of a select team, designing  user experience for
>multiple commercial and educational web projects, until Free Software
>crossed my path in 2009 and first came the idea of ​​getting involved
>with the group which was also dedicated software design aimed at
>children of primary school.
>
>I was accepted as a research associate at Escuelab and from there and
>hand to hand with Sebastian Silva, we incubated the research project
>somosazucar.org / sugarlab Peru with the aim of encouraging the use and
>development of free software SUGAR.
>
>My vision and reason for filing this application, is to align the
>system's efforts towards creating a secure, open and free Sugar Users
>Network where end users can interact with designers and developers.
>
>To achieve this goal I propose first to strengthen the network of local
>laboratories, procuring their sustainability and the sharing of their
>experiences and results.
>
>--
>Luke Faraone
>Membership and Elections Committee
>Sugar Labs
>
>
>
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