[IAEP] running for reelection

[Walter Bender]

As per Luke's announcement last week, we will be holding an election
in November for three Sugar Labs oversight positions. My position on
the board is expiring. After giving it some thought, once again 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 learning. The
local-lab program, which I think is core to our long-term future, 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 co-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—a testament to the
quality of our community.) At Sugar Labs, I wear many hats: I am the
developer or maintainer of numerous Activities, including Turtle
Art/Blocks/Confusion, 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://plant.sugarlabs.org.

regards.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org