[IAEP] [SLOBS] Future of Sugar Labs

[Tony Anderson]

Hi, All

I certainly appreciate the attention my email has received. However, I 
am disappointed that the responses do not reflect my main concern. I 
beleive
Sugar and Sugar Labs will fade away if it continues to be perceived as 
the software that comes on an XO. I believe Sugar Labs and Sugar should 
be perceived as in a similar relationship as Red Hat is to Fedora and 
Canonical is to Ubuntu.

We need to have releases of Sugar: Long-term-support, latest stable, and 
developer. These releases should be downloadable as a single image which 
can be installed from a livecd usb stick generated by a dd command. The 
starting point is probably SOAS - which is not now installable without a 
technically difficult use of livecd tools in a Fedora 24 installation 
(which is difficult since Fedora provides Fedora 25).

As an evaluation of Sugar Lab's success is that the Mexican deployment 
presented in the OLPC SF Summit chooses to use Sugar instead of UberMix.
(http://www.ubermix.org/).

We should be able to speak about Sugar deployments as we now speak about 
OLPC deployments. Sugar should be available for PCs and mobile devices 
with xo being considered as one of the supported environments.

If no action is taken except to discuss future academic papers about 
Sugar Labs and SLOB elections, I think both will become totally 
irrelevant. Current OLPC deployments will choose new hardware to replace 
XOs and install on this hardware Windows, Raspbian, Chrome OS, UberMix 
or other readily available and supported alternatives. Sugar will join 
APL and Cobol in computer history.

Tony

On 12/02/2016 07:16 AM, Dave Crossland wrote:
>
> There is a IAEP thread "Preparing for the 2017 SLOB Election" in early 
> August that has more details about all this.
>
> First, I want to note that while an 'election committee' has been 
> mentioned, Walter said in that earlier thread:
>
>     I am of the opinion that SLOB does not have to approve individual
>     membership in committees. SLOB responsibility vis-a-vis committees
>     is to appoint a representative. So I don't think we need a motion.
>
>
> As Caryl and Seb have reiterated on this thread: while they both 
> helped run the election last year, they both said a few months ago 
> that they are unable to volunteer for this year.
>
> At that time I offered to volunteer, as did Samson; and I found a 
> possible web app to run the election and suggested Samuel Cantero 
> could set it up, and he graciously did set it up.
>
> However, by September, (a) the GSOC project to make a font editor 
> activity wound up, and (b)  Sameer offered to lead the vision thing, 
> and until that is done I am not confident about taking any other 
> actions, and (c) I accepted an employment offer by Google and have had 
> less free time since then compared to when I was working as a 
> consultant, so I haven't done more of the things I said I would do. I 
> wrote on August 5:
>
>
>     So, I volunteer to do the following before the next SLOB meeting:
>
>     - I will ask Sam C to set up a new
>     sugar-announce at lists.sugarlabs.org
>     <mailto:sugar-announce at lists.sugarlabs.org> mailing list with
>     himself, myself, samson, caryl and seb as list admins.
>
>     - I will complete the review of all accounts on the wiki to mark
>     the ones that look like spammers
>
>     - I will make a final 'all possible members' email list
>
>     - I will draft the email that asks people to join the announce
>     list and explains why I am asking them to do this, and a motion to
>     approve the election email, and share it on the IAEP list for
>     community review
>
>     - I will ask SLOBs to post and second the motion
>
>     Then in early September I can send the email, and prepare a report
>     with the new list of members and similarly to before another draft
>     email soliciting board applications for SLOB to review and approve
>     in the October meeting.
>
>     Then in early October I can send that email, perhaps also with the
>     donation request, and then prepare a final email calling for votes
>     that SLOB can review and approve in the November meeting.
>
>     Then in early November the call for votes can go out, votes can
>     come in, and in early December the results can be announced.
>
>
> I still think this process is a good one, but regretfully I am not 
> going to be able to put much effort into this until January at the 
> earliest.
>
> So, I suggest that Samson and anyone who wants to volunteer to run the 
> election take a look at that web app with Sam C and see if it really 
> will work for Sugar Labs in 2016.
>
> If not, http://civs.cs.cornell.edu was used last year and should be a 
> suitable mechanism for people to cast votes.
>
> Finally, I think the very next step is for whoever volunteers to run 
> the election to come up with a list of members emails to solicit votes 
> from. (Where the discussions last trailed off was in discussing who 
> should be on this 'final members list' - I think we agreed to cast a 
> very wide net, and I made some progress reviewing wiki accounts and, 
> defining the members list based on wiki + mailing list posters. I am 
> happy to share that WIP and explain what I would do next with it, but 
> it may be better for the person to start their own list.)

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