Not such a silly idea .. if you put in place an informal feedback and community mechanism that will not gum up your current operational mechanism. Perhaps an informal group called "Polysaccharide: Linking the friends of sugar" I had some interest at the QSITE conference in Brisbane where I had the opportunity to showcase some of the work by Sugar on a Stick. There was considerable interest from one teacher who was demonstrating his experiments with Linux on a stick. He was interested in the thought of engaging his young students with a wider development community that could better understand roadmaps and software is developed and how he could use this to introduce them to a wider world of testing and submitting feature requests. regards Roland <div class="gmail_quote">2009/10/5 Sean DALY <<a href="http://sdaly.be">sdaly.be</a>@<a href="http://gmail.com">gmail.com</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-) It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for marketing to children, especially as prescriptors ("Papa, I want Sugar Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.") For this reason, cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course, sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However, companies are very leery of any association which could impact their brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work. Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the marketshare problem. What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand. Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market, taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might be willing to give the space away. However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet; bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio / fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional cereals... Sean <div><div></div><div class="h5"> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <<a href="mailto:bmschwar@fas.harvard.edu">bmschwar@fas.harvard.edu</a>> wrote: > Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if > they think it will help them to sell more cereal. What greater way to > make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar? The bootable DVD could > include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia. > > I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that > it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we are > not far, given the motivation. The trickier thing is to convince a cereal > distributor of the idea. > > I leave that as an exercise to the reader. > > --Ben > > P.S. We might have to employ a different branding if "Sugar" is a > problematic name in this context. > > </div></div>> _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> > <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </blockquote></div> -- Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College <a href="http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au">http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au</a> "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." --Margaret Mead