[IAEP] ubuntu-sugar-remix release.

[David Farning]

I thought that I would send the week's summary to our friends
upstream.  IFF they feel it is useful, I would like to continue
sharing a weekly summary with them.  It is always good to hear how
people are using and building on your work.

Each week I try to send out a summary and status report including the
follow 5 areas:
--End Users--
--Developers--
--Community--
--Thanks--
--Call to Action--

This week Is going to be a little different. Progress on the remix was
a bust this week.  Not the usual hype you expect from someone trying
to start a new project.  But, your trust is the my primary concern at
this stage.

This week was mostly organisational stuff.  A lot of big decisions
about how to move forward needed attention.
1.  I am starting a company to provide support for Ubuntu-Sugar-Remix.
The (very tentative) name will be USER Linux for
User {Sugar, Squeak, Scratch} Educational Remix. (Caroline Meek's idea
adapted slightly for my needs:)  One must pay homage to the rich
tradition of recursive name.  It has been a tough decision and a
pretty big risk.  I now have to make a weekly payroll with no
immediate sign of income.

2.  The wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix got a revamp.
 I am pretty excited about
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix/Test . The plan is to adopt
the XO smoke test into a use case driven test suite.  Rather than
having customers think in terms of features and bug reports.  I would
like to think in term of uses and tests.  This gives two wins, teacher
and deployers think in terms of uses.  They want to _do_ something
with sugar.  And, the test suite will be great to verify what is works
and what does not work at any given time an various types of hardware.

4.  Worked with the Rochester Institute of Technology and Sugar Labs
to set up hosting for activities.sugarlabs.org at the University.  My
assumption as communicated on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix/Roadmap is that content is
king.  Last January I had the chance to talk with Bryan Berry the CTO
of the OLE Nepal.  He expressed a thought that resonated with me.  The
XO and Sugar are cool technologies that people want.  Useful
activities are what will turn that want into a need.

3.  Worked with Sugar Labs to establish what we need to do to use the
trademarks owned by Sugar Labs.

4. Started formalising a business model and price structure.  I am
currently charging $40 per hour for my time working on deployment
issues.  I am encouraging organisations to 'pay' their tabs with work
sweat equity[1].  High school interns 'earn' $10 per hour for their
school.  College interns and work study students 'earn' $20 per hour.
My rational is threefold:
a. Create a transactional ecosystem to augment the reciprocity based
ecosystem of Sugar Labs.
b. Foster local pockets of Sugar expertise.
c. Encourage student involvement.  After all it's a learning project:)

The goal is to grow the ecosystem to the point where some
organisations are willing to pay cash so that we can hire developers
to expand the project.

== Call to action ==
I would like to encourage mentors to get involved in the project. Much
of our time and energy is spent getting students involved in the
project.  It would be great if a few people could step up and
volunteer as mentors for them.

As usual, the weekly release will be available by Sunday night.  For
the the lawyers out there, Sunday night mean 'before I go to sleep'.
If I am on Bernie time, Sunday night might actually fall on noon
Monday
david

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_equity