<div dir="ltr"><div>Devin,</div><div><br></div><div>I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for, but this is my story:</div><div><br></div><div>I started working with OLPC with the Give One Get One program back in 2007. I was more interested in getting an XO laptop for myself than in working for the project. I thought I could use the laptop to read plain text books from Project Gutenberg. Kindles were very expensive back then and this looked like a good alternative, and it was, but I was disappointed to find out that the Read Activity provided only worked with PDFs. I taught myself to program in Python, studied the code for the Read Activity, and created the Read Etexts Activity which supported reading plain text files. I next decided I wanted to have an Activity for reading comic books in CBZ format and created two of them: View Slides and Read SD Comics.</div><div><br></div><div>The best and maybe only way to learn how to create Activities at that time was to study the code of existing ones. I'm a Systems Analyst so that wasn't too bad for me but for teachers and their students it wasn't great. Somehow or other in 2009 or 2010 I convinced myself to write a proper manual, called <i>Make Your Own Sugar Activities!</i> I did this using the Floss Manuals website. I was fortunate enough to have a very nice cover illustration done for me by Oceana Rain Fields, a student participating in the Rural Design Collective's summer mentorship program. The printed book was given out as a door prize at one of the first OLPC conferences. The book was later translated into Spanish by a team of Sugar Labs volunteers as <i>Como Hacer Una Actividad Sugar</i>. <br><br></div><div>I followed this up with a manual on obtaining, reading, and donating free ebooks called <i>EBook Enlightenment</i>, with cover and interior illustrations also provided by Oceana Rain Fields. To research this book I donated books to <a href="http://archive.org">archive.org</a> and Project Gutenberg and made a book scanning device of my own design for photographing book pages. I also installed a local instance of the Floss Manuals Booktype software and used it and some Linux OCR software to finish a manuscript that I had abandoned back in the nineteen eighties, about my experiences in the Hare Krishna movement, which I renamed to <i>The Life And Times of Bhakta Jim</i>.</div><div><br></div><div>I fell away from participating in Sugar Labs after that, but I continued donating texts to <a href="http://archive.org">archive.org</a> and Project Gutenberg and have been working on a Science Fiction novel which I may one day finish.</div><div><br></div><div>My participation in Sugar Labs never involved any work with actual children, but recently I had the opportunity to introduce a nine year old boy to Linux. I had intended to give his older brother (who was studying computer programming in college) an old Linux desktop but his brother decided that it should be his computer instead. I gave the computer a functioning Sugar environment and rewrote some of my old Activities in Python 3 to work on that, but for now he's mostly interested in learning Flight Gear and playing games like Tux Kart and Sopwith.</div><div><br></div><div>James Simmons</div><div><br></div><div><h1 class="entry-title"></h1></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 9:16 AM Devin Ulibarri <<a href="mailto:devin@sugarlabs.org">devin@sugarlabs.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
<p>Dear Sugar community members,</p>
<p>Sugar Labs is growing, and we need volunteer help with various
tasks.</p>
<p>To help keep track of the various roles and tasks where help is
needed, I created the following page on our wiki: <a href="https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Help_Wanted" target="_blank">https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Help_Wanted</a><br>
</p>
<div>Some of the roles that I'd like to
highlight are:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Elections Officer: Help run elections for Sugar Labs' board
members; This role will receive support from myself, as ED,
and the board.</li>
<li>Website help: <a href="http://sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">sugarlabs.org</a> is a static site, created with
Jeckyll. We could use some help updating it, improving it, and
documenting a workflow</li>
<li>New volunteers for our Marketing Team: Help us bring Sugar
Labs to the people!</li>
<li>Sugar Labs stories: Did participating in the Sugar Labs
community have a positive impact on your life? If so, we'd
like to help you tell that story. Simply send an approx. three
paragraph draft, and we'll help you edit and publish it.</li>
<li>Don't have any time for the above? Well, the easiest way to
support with your time is to follow us on social media and
share/boost our posts. Help us spread the word!<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Devin<br>
</p>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>-- <br>
<p>Learn more: <a href="https://sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">https://sugarlabs.org</a></p>
<p>Help us grow: <a href="https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Donate" target="_blank">https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Donate</a></p>
</div>
</div>
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</blockquote></div>