[sugar] Privately-owned data on XOs?

[Antoine van Gelder]

Towards an order of magnitude improvement in the quality of output from 
the collaborative activities of children:


Goal: The XO architecture is intentionally designed, from the ground up, 
to foster high quality output from the collaborative activities of children.


Requirement #1: The history of work and contributions of all members of 
the community of children are visible to any participant in that community.

Requirement #2: Children (and adults!) need a safe place to think about 
their contributions to the collaborative effort.


Solution bias for requirement #1 -> All data are shared by default and 
an explicit action is required to make work private.

Solution bias for requirement #2 -> All data are private by default and 
an explicit action is required to make work public.


Assumption underlying conflict between biases: The space within which 
the children collaborate publicly is the same space in which they do 
their private thinking, so we cannot simultaneously set conflicting 
defaults.


Example of an environment where this conflict does not exist: git

Hair-brained idea #332 of #663 which must be stressed is _not_ expected 
to be considered as a solution but rather one of many ideas which may be 
heading in the vague general direction of a solution:

   The school server has git repositories holding the Journal contents
   for each class over the course of a school year. Children have their
   own Journal on their local machines and check in contributions to
   the 'master' Journal on the server.

  - a

-- 

"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a
  design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication
  structure."

  - Melvin Conway