[Sugar-devel] Development team mission

[Simon Wood]

> What should our mission be? How can we help Sugar Labs to survive and succeed?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any feedback!
> 

As a 'newbie' to the scene, here is my view on the situation:

The sugar interface is targetted at a very specific market, the only way for it to suceed is to get demo's into the hands of educators and school IT staff. Regardless on how technically good the solution is, it will not suceed without gaining some credability with the people who might run it in the classroom.

There a very few people in the world who will go out of their way to investigate a minority application, even if it is the coolest thing since ... [insert something _really_ cool here].

Hopefully with upcoming 0.84 release, the base feature set will be strong enough to encourage people to investigate futher.


I believe the work of Caroline and the other 'Sugar on a Stick' folks are the key to demostrating the potential of sugar, and also provide a workable model for real-life class room implementation.


Unfortunately SoaS is not 'there' yet, there are a number of things that need to (and will be) sorted out over time.


From a 'marketing' point of view Sugar Labs needs to establish a brand for the Sugar interface, something that the programmers and developers can work with to create applications linked into this brand. Once most of the technical issues are sorted there needs to be a marketing effort to get the word out to the people in the field, and get them to give it a go. This more than likely means producing CD's and USB sticks to hand out to teachers at educational trade shows.

Personally, I am really excited about the SoaS sub-project and have already learnt an awful lot just playing around with it.

Yours,
Simon Wood.
(aka. Mungewell)