Thoughts about government funding - US and EU

[Mel Chua]

 > 1. Here in the US ride the trend for change to emphasise funding to
 > solve infrastructure issues.

Have we sufficiently positioned Sugar as infrastructure? (Something that 
encompasses and supports the entire learning experience, rather than a 
separate shiny software toy you can go play with off in a corner 
somewhere for an hour a week.)

Side note: this is one of the reasons I'm really excited about the 
pilots, because gathering good data, observations, and,  most 
importantly, stories about Sugar-as-infrastructure will probably be 
*the* most attention-getting thing we have, whether it's for a grant 
proposal, a presentation/demo, or anything else.

> In my opinion the result is incredibly cool stuff that no one is using.

 > 2. Push for funding to be tied to how many students are using the
 > results of a project.

(Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with grant applications. I would like to 
learn.)

Would it be worth it, perhaps as a joint marketing/education team 
miniproject, to try to put together a "here are 
{NSF,other-big-grant-org}-funded projects that Sugar could bring to a 
much wider audience" brochure/page/letter? (As part of a "therefore, 
NSF/other-big-grant-org should fund Sugar because we make all the rest 
of the things you've funded Way More Effective" thing.)

Maybe a place to start would be to have a 1-2 hour "find these projects" 
sprint - go through journals, award webpages, etc. and pick out neat but 
non-widespread projects, then do a cursory evaluation of how much 
engineering (and educator-training) time and effort would be needed to 
make it Sugar-riffic.

I'd be willing to come and hack on such a sprint, if someone else would 
run it. I don't know much about where to find these studies, how to 
evaluate how useful they'd be to us, or how to present our findings in a 
way that will appeal to resource-distributing organizations, but I can 
follow instructions and ask lots of questions.

--Mel