[IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gonzalo - I'm sorry, I was unable to attend the SLOBs meeting today.
>
> There are issues with doing PR about the release
>
> * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development
> ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity
> work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of
> Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile
> devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no
> longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the
> XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC.
>
> * Our target market, the ten million or so grade-school teachers worldwide,
> can't benefit from the release; there are no installers. There are detailed
> instructions for using virtualization on the wiki thanks to satellit, and
> the consistently good work of probinson on SoaS, but the release itself
> won't be news if no one can use it.

But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS!

> For these reasons (as mentioned on the marketing list) an
> Activity/pedagogical focus is a safe bet. Unfortunately our Turtle Art Day
> PR flopped because publication of the Spanish PR was delayed by two days
> (technical bottleneck which I very much hope we will be able to solve). The
> PR will however fulfill its role of background for interested journalists
> (www.sugarlabs.org/press). I haven't expected any wider press coverage for
> some time now, since we don't have any easy-to-try products available and
> OLPC's press communications are meant to imply that laptops are out and the
> Android tablet is in, leaving Sugar in limbo. An easy installation & use
> procedure for Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi could have major press
> impact, but I don't know how near or far we are from those.

Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi might have an interesting
marketing effect but the result would be truly terrible as it would be
essentially unusable and have a terrible experience. There are a
number of other ARM devices that sugar runs beautifully on though.
Ultimately marketing needs to actually actively engage with the rest
of the people doing the work to find out what's being done and market
on something to ensure Sugar is regularly in the news to keep it in
people's mind as opposed to waiting and hoping for a single enormous
event.

Peter