[IAEP] What's the long term vision of Sugar Labs?

[Sumit Srivastava]

Great points, Alex.

I would love to hear from all of you, especially the senior members of the
SL community, before we discuss all the points one by one.

Regards
Sumit

On Fri, 29 Mar 2019, 6:49 am Alex Perez, <aperez at alexperez.com> wrote:

> Sumit,
>
> Great questions, and they're particularly relevant at this phase/age of
> the existence of Sugar Labs. They certainly can't be answered in a single
> e-mail, however I think this is a perfect conversation to have,
> particularly on our IAEP mailing list, which is our general purpose mailing
> list.
>
> Sumit Srivastava wrote on 3/28/19 5:00 PM:
>
> Do we aim to be like Red Hat? Canonical? No match? Who are we closest to?
> Who do we aim to be?
>
>
> Speaking as an Oversight Board member, I do not believe it is in the
> interest of Sugar Labs to attempt to emulate a company like Red Hat and
> Canonical. These companies have hundreds/thousands of paid employees, and
> their organizational structure is a product of the needs of their corporate
> customers.
>
> Right now, we have a few existential problems on the horizon, one of which
> is a long term problem, but which we now need to address in the short-term:
> Maintainability. Sugar has a lot of "technical debt", and unless we can
> complete our goal of 100% Python 3 compatibility of all core Sugar
> libraries and the toolkit, we risk the loss of being able to be run as a
> desktop environment on current versions of Linux, due to our reliance on
> Python 2. Since Python 2 has been on life support for many, many years, and
> is only nine months from being officially retired, it will no longer be
> maintained by the Python Foundation, nor included by default in the next
> versions of Fedora and Ubuntu. You can read further details about the
> sunsetting of Python 2 at https://pythonclock.org
>
> <https://pythonclock.org/>
>
>
> I understand that these are a lot of questions. You can also share
> relevant mail archive links if they're available.
>
> I also understand that we're a non profit and the organisations I
> mentioned might not be a close match.
>
> I personally do not think the core entity of Sugar Labs should be a
> commercial entity, but non-profit organizations are completely entitled to
> be profitable, and many are quite  for the profitable. Personally, I would
> like to see the development of a federated model, where we have
> country/regionally-centered "chapters" of Sugar Labs, with Sugar Labs
> itself taking the in-the-field feedback from our distributed user base, and
> incorporating and triaging suggestions/feedback,
>
>
> Essense of my question: If we could achieve anything, what would we want?
>
> I would love to see a world where Sugar was used extensively, worldwide,
> by children in the primary school age range, with a wide range of
> actively-maintained activities, relevant to the current curricula of a
> variety of countries, and of interest to elementary school teachers, across
> all socioeconomic groups. How we get there is the real question, assuming
> we want to, and have the organizational will to do so.
>
> As for what our "long term vision" is, I honestly don't think we have one
> at this point, and we should fix that, which is one of the reasons why I
> chose to run for the Sugar Labs Oversight Board. Our next meeting is next
> Friday, on 2019-04-05 at 20:00 UTC, on IRC, in the #sugar-meeting channel
> on FreeNode. Feel free to join us and observe, as well as ask questions
> before and after the official meeting commences.
>
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board
>
>
> Regards
> Sumit Srivastava
>
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