[IAEP] Sugar Labs 2017 Budget

[Tony Anderson]

On 03/02/2017 02:51 PM, Laura Vargas wrote:
> As for the 2017 Budget, Sugar Labs needs doable specific proposals for 
> funding and investing as a healthy financial planning should consider 
> a minimum of 5 years ahead.

The real need is not for financial planning, but for planning. A real 
five-year plan would be the result of serious thinking by members of the 
community about what Sugar Labs needs to do so that Sugar can survive. 
The essential piece of that is that Sugar must be available as widely as 
possible. Thankfully, Lionel Laske has taken on creating a Sugar for 
mobile devices (and the cloud).

So what is needed is some serious technical and policy discussions on 
how this can be accomplished. The five-year plan should address release 
schedules, short and long-term support policies (Do we support Sugar on 
Windows 10 for five years?). Currently Sugar is implemented with 
separate login on Ubuntu. Is this what we want or would it be better for 
Sugar to be an gnome application like GIMP. We are maintaining source on 
github, but Debian is maintaining its own source repository. What is the 
connection. Is it possible to co-ordinate releases? if there is a Debian 
version of Sugar should it be based on our repository or theirs? If we 
have a Debian Sugar, do we also need a release for Ubuntu, for RPi? Is 
Sugarizer the successor to Sugar or do we maintain Sugar for Linux 
capable devices and Sugarizer for mobile devices? What is the role of 
the schoolserver in Sugar deployments. Do we believe that Sugar 
deployments will soon have broadband internet access 24/7 for free and 
so schoolservers will no longer be necessary? Do we believe that Sugar 
Labs mission is to support deployments on the wrong side of the gap 
which will not have affordable internet for the forseeable future and 
that school servers are an essential component of a Sugar deployment?

Yes, you can't tell volunteers what to work on. They make that decision. 
However, if volunteers understand the technical need and have the 
knowledge and experience to help, they generally will. So undertaking 
these sorts of technical discussions can help us get the volunteers we 
need.

Tony