[Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.

[Daniel Narvaez]

On 31 October 2013 19:31, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Here's OLPC's mission, as a reminder:
> >
> > Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's
> > poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost,
> > low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for
> > collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.
> >
>
> I think we all share concerns about the future of OLPCA (Indeed, I
> left OLPC in 2008 to start Sugar Labs in part because of my concerns
> about strategy and pedagogy.) That said, I continue to work in support
> of OLPC's efforts since I believe that they are still a viable vehicle
> to reach millions of children. But Sugar Labs is not OLPC. And Sugar
> Labs has a future independent of OLPC. In 2008 we made a decision as a
> community to be agnostic about hardware to the extent possible and
> that is reflected in our code. In 2010, we made the decision to make
> HTML5/Javascript a first-class development environment for Sugar with
> the goals of both reaching more kids and attracting more developers.
> This is work in progress, but we (Manuq and Daniel) have made great
> strides. We face further challenges ahead. But our mission remains:
>
> to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning
> platform; it is a support base and gathering place for the community
> of educators and developers to create, extend, teach, and learn with
> the Sugar learning platform.



Both being hardware agnostic and OS agnostic make sense at a certain level.
But I feel like Sugar Labs needs one or more well defined flagship products
to focus on. That gives us something to market, to test, to design for.

The only Sugar based product which has really been successful until now is
the XO. And that makes us still very dependent on OLPC strategies.

Given the uncertainity of the OLPC situation (or rather it seems pretty
certain that their investement on Sugar has been heavily scaled down), I
think Sugar Labs should try to come up with another flagship product to
focus on. Sugar on Raspberry? Sugar as a cross OS application? Sugar on
some custom built (by who?) piece of hardware? I don't know but I feel it's
something we will need to figure out.
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