[Sugar-devel] Volunteer help wanted: Elections officer, marketing, story-telling, and more

[James Simmons]

Devin,

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for, but this is
my story:

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.

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 *Make Your Own Sugar Activities!* 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 *Como Hacer Una Actividad Sugar*.

I followed this up with a manual on obtaining, reading, and donating free
ebooks called *EBook Enlightenment*, with cover and interior illustrations
also provided by Oceana Rain Fields. To research this book I donated books
to archive.org 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 *The Life And Times of Bhakta Jim*.

I fell away from participating in Sugar Labs after that, but I continued
donating texts to archive.org and Project Gutenberg and have been working
on a Science Fiction novel which I may one day finish.

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.

James Simmons


On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 9:16 AM Devin Ulibarri <devin at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> Dear Sugar community members,
>
> Sugar Labs is growing, and we need volunteer help with various tasks.
>
> To help keep track of the various roles and tasks where help is needed, I
> created the following page on our wiki:
> https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Help_Wanted
> Some of the roles that I'd like to highlight are:
>
>    - Elections Officer: Help run elections for Sugar Labs' board members;
>    This role will receive support from myself, as ED, and the board.
>    - Website help: sugarlabs.org is a static site, created with Jeckyll.
>    We could use some help updating it, improving it, and documenting a workflow
>    - New volunteers for our Marketing Team: Help us bring Sugar Labs to
>    the people!
>    - 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.
>    - 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!
>
> Best,
>
> Devin
>
> --
>
> Learn more: https://sugarlabs.org
>
> Help us grow: https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Donate
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
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