[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-05-24

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. Sugar 0.96 has been officially released. You can read all about it at [1].

2. Guzmán Trinidad has posted some great videos of various physics
investigations on the XO (See [2]).

3. EduJAM! presented awards for the best Sugar activities [3].
Although they were not singled out in any special way, the youth of
Uruguay managed to walk away with six of the prizes. Congratulations
to Christofer, Agustin, Daniel, et al. for your contributions. A tip
of the hat to the adult contributors too: Flavio, Gabriel, Alan,
Andres, and Alejandro.

By my rough estimate, approximately 10% of all Sugar activities have
been written by kids who grew up on Sugar. It would interesting to
understand the phenomenon. But we must be doing something right.

I did learn that Christofer has been in an on-going dialog with
Rosamel Ramirez, a teacher in Duranzo about his activity development.
Their latest collaboration is JAMuliples [4]. Good stuff.

4. Some of you may be following the discussion about "New Co." on the
iaep list [5] and [6]. To summarize, we are exploring alternative
structures for Sugar Labs, which may well involve the creation of a
new organization -- to augment our FOSS development efforts housed at
the SFC -- to support the auxillary operations involved with
supporting the code in the field.

I solicited feedback on the specific goals for a New Co. Aleksey Lim
reminded us that our stated mission as a community is much broader
than just software development [7]: we want our software to be used
and we want to have a positive influence of other people writing
learning software. We came together as a community because we share
certain principles about learning and we want to help people to
"embody these principals 'in the field'."

In trying to answer my specific question, Aleksey said: the "new
organization should provide practices and procedures how to setup
local deployment program in most useful way." and the "new
organization should provide a way to forward funding... to particular
program[s] and provide everything to make this funding open/clear for
donators and easy handled by local deployment people." Finally, he
posited that perhaps the "new organization will be a guarantee for
institutions where local deployment happens (schools, etc.) to make
them assured that even after finishing the program, there will be a
way to get some help."

Martin Langhoff raised some important points as well: "The _top
priority_ should be to get stuff done with your own means...", that
"the good name of SL is a precious asset based on work from a global
effort", but we should "let each group do their own thing. It's their
name, their reputation on the line."

We'll be continuing the discuss at next week's Sugar Labs oversight
board (SLOB) meeting. Please join us.

5. On a personal note, my heart goes out to Marco Presenti Gritti, who
posted on his blog [8] this week that he has cancer. For those of you
who do not know him, Marco was part of the team that created Sugar and
was at my side when we created Sugar Labs. Marco: know that there are
many people thinking of you.

=== Sugar Labs ===

Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter

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

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[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.96/Notes
[2] https://sites.google.com/site/solymar1fisica/fisica-con-xo-investigacion-/videos-youtube-fisica-con-xo
[3] http://edujam2012.blogspot.com/p/nominados.html
[4] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4572
[5] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-May/015272.html
[6] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-May/015288.html
[7] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/What_is_Sugar
[8] http://theoria.me/#cancer
[9] http://planet.sugarlabs.org