[IAEP] Sugar Labs 2017 Budget

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

On 26 February 2017 at 11:44, Sebastian Silva <sebastian at fuentelibre.org> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> On 25/02/17 20:33, Tymon Radzik wrote:
>
>> Sugar Labs is by its statement volunteer-driven project. We are volunteers.
>> We work for the idea of the free and open software and not for own financial
>> profit.
>
> It is worth to reflect upon this point. Certainly the design and engineering
> teams of Redhat and OLPC that built Sugar in the first place weren't unpaid
> volunteers.

They were also not part of Sugar Labs.

> I like to think that we're all volunteers, in that, we are not
> motivated by money, and if we could do more, we would.
>
> (Lack of) Investment in software infrastructure for education is a large
> void that ultimately implies a hidden cost of integration, field support,
> even the impossibility of deployment. Who is doing this work required to
> take Sugar* (a component) and make it into end user solutions?

There are organizations like oneeducation and kidsoncomputers that do
this work; and it seems to me that they don't focus on Sugar because
it isn't what people want.

An anecdote: Around the end of last summer, I spoke to someone
involved in Sugar a while ago, based in the US, who helps refugees to
the US with some computing stuff. He was listed in the wiki. The idea
of booting a PC off a USB stick - let alone installing a dual boot
setup - was so intimidating for these families, where any trouble
running the existing Windows/Office tools that the parents in the
families needed to keep their families off the streets - that he was
unable to get a single child, highly motivated from tutored use of
Sugar at school - to make use of it at home.

Sugarizer presents such children with a more viable option to take
more active direction over their own learning, being web based, and
packaged for a kid who has a hand-me-down mobile device.

However, it is unclear to me if my premise in the line above - that
Sugar Labs should focus on subverting schools, by empowering kids to
teach themselves, and avoiding the need for field support and
deployment managed by adults - is closer to what Sugar Labs should be,
or if the premie that Caryl outlined in her last email in this thread
- that Sugar Labs should focus on supporting schools, by adjusting
Sugar software to meet the pedagogical theories of common schools - is
closer.

As Samson and I have been saying, last year we all agreed to wait for
Sameer to provide a vision, missions, etc.

I suppose that if Sameer doesn't do this soon,

> While it is probably human nature to distrust, I think Laura is proposing to
> shift from just hiring strangers that walk away after 3 months with $5000,

I'm confused. When was $5,000 paid out to someone who delivered nothing? :)

> to sustaining long term active members with a small stipend for a year, in
> the hope (and trust) that they will increase their effort and involvement,
> as well as attract more active contributors. Whether this will result in a
> better Sugar a year from now, and whether it is sustainable, remains to be
> seen, as well as the specific dynamics of such a program.

This strategy seems high risk, to me.

> The following is an excerpt from "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind
> Our Digital Infrastructure" (license: CC-BY, author: Nadia Eghbal)
>
> I recommend reading the whole book and we can think how it applies to a
> project like Sugar Labs, that has no money making product, but rather is a
> knowledge multiplying community, and how society can nurture it.

I've read the book; after publishing it, Nadia then went to work for
Github and in her role there has just published
http://opensource.guide which has a section on funding directly.

However, I think the funds that accrue to SL from its GSOC/GCI
programs provide adequate funding for the project to continue
indefinitely as a volunteer-run one. It is not clear to me that any
additional funds should be sought until the org and the project have
been reconstituted for 2017 to 2027. That costs nothing :)

-- 
Cheers
Dave