[Community-news] Sugar Digest 2008-05-26

Mon May 26 11:49:49 EDT 2008

== Sugar Digest ==

1. About this list: Over the two-plus years I was at OLPC, I posted a
weekly digest of OLPC news to the community-news at lists.laptop.org
list. I also had been updating the news page in the OLPC wiki every
weekend. Now that I am devoting my energies to Sugar Labs, I will
start posting a weekly digest of Sugar news to
community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org (I'll cross post to
its.an.education.project at lists.sugarlabs.org and
sugar at lists.laptop.org, but I will *not* cross-post to
community-news at lists.laptop.org beyond this announcement). Please send
me any updates by the weekend for inclusion in what will most often be
a Monday-morning post. More information about the list, including
subscription instructions and and archives can be found here
(http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news).

* sugar at lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing
technical details of the Sugar project;
* its.an.education.project at lists.sugarlabs.org is a forum for
discussing the impact of Sugar (and related technologies, such as
Etoys) on learning, including discussion of observations from the
field;
* community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org is a weekly digest of
Sugar-related news and discussions;
* devel at lists.laptop.org remains the primary forum for discussing
OLPC-XO-specific technical details.

Other distribution-specific lists are beginning to be made, such as:

* http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-olpc-devel

Other communication channels include:

* http://planet.sugarlabs.org
* #Sugar on irc.freenode.net

2. It has been just a few weeks since we launched the Sugar Labs
initiative and the pace of activity is already picking up. Among the
highlights are the creation of wiki.sugarlabs.org (special thanks to
Helga Schmidt) and creation of the its.an.education.project list
(thanks to Aaron Kaplan).

The mailing list discussion has seen an interesting progression: it
began as a discussion about the relationship between Sugar and the XO
laptop and has morphed into a discussion about learning. These trends
are evident in some self-organizing maps of the list activity
generated by Gary Martin (author of the Moon activity):

Compare
       http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-May-01-09-som.jpg
with
       http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-May-17-23-som.jpg

(Gary has put the image thumbs and some basic text description on his
user page—http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Garycmartin—and is looking
for feedback as to how to make these visualizations more useful.)

3. The wiki has already almost 150 registered users and well over 1000
page edits. Highlights include:

* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User_Manual
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Supported_systems
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Roadmap
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Release
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Request_New_Features

Be sure also visit:

* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/SugarLabs:Community_Portal
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GetInvolved
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/FAQ

We are discussing the goals and principles of Sugar Labs here:

* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Sugar_Labs

== Community jams and meet-ups ==

4. Family XO Mesh Meet-up: Mike Lee teamed up with Kevin Cole to host
an event at Gallaudet University on 24 May. (See
http://olpclearningclub.org/meetings/summer-blockbusters-at-gallaudet/
for event details.) Photos from the meeting can be found at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157604752586251/.

5. PERU OLPC Jam: Hernan Pachas is organizing a jam during the VISION
2008 and Open Source Day planned for October at the University of San
Martin de Porres (USMP). Details will be forthcoming.

6. Unconference: In the tradition of Barcamp, OLPC will be holding a
grassroots "unconference" the weekend of 7 June, dedicated towards
community-organization, and initiatives, events, structures, and best
practices. This is not just an
OLPC event—anyone with interest in grassroots organizing is invited to
attend. (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_unconference
or contact Mel Chua at mel at laptop.org for more information.)

7. Bootcamp: OLPC is also hosting a bootcamp and conference from 9–12
June 2008 in Cambridge, MA for current and future organizers of local
groups. The objective of the bootcamp is to help community members
become grassroots advisors, who can serve as resources to others who
want to start local initiatives. (Please contact Mel for more
information.)

8. Grassroots Jam: a jam will be held in New York City on 14–15 June
2008, run by the bootcamp attendees. The jam, open to
everyone, will focus on development of individual and group projects
that could work on/with Sugar and/or XO laptops. (Please see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_Jam for more information.)

==Tech Talk==

9. BugSquad: David Farning is forming a Sugar BugSquad. His goals are:

* Squash bugs;
* Develop the concept of teams within sugar development community; and
* Start recruiting community members in an orderly manner to the project.

Most of the early effort will be developing a triage guide and working
through the backlog of bugs. Where appropriate, David is basing the
Sugar bugsquad off the Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu bugsquads. (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/BugSquad for more information.)

10. Debian: Jonas Smedegaard reports that the status of the Sugar
source package Debian's testing distribution has changed.

	Previous version: (not in testing)
	Current version:  0.79.4-2

All core Sugar packages are now in Debian testing! Please speak up if
you are interested in helping out.

11. v-toys: V-toys, a visual scripting system compatible with Etoys,
is now available (Please see
http://community.ofset.org/index.php/V-toys_international); you'll
find some documentation and tutorials on the same page.

12. iStoa.net: Hilaire Fernandes reports that iSTOA, a platform
interactive educational activities and monitoring via the Internet,
which runs on top of Squeak, can run on the XO laptop (Please see
http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/2008/05/24/iStoanet-lands-on-Olpc).

13. Gnash: Rob Savoye reminds us that the most uptodate Gnash builds
can be found on http://getgnash.org and that we are in need of someone
to maintain gnash rpms.

14. Sugar core: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Simon
Schampijer have been working on a variety of Sugar improvements.

Tomeu has worked on:
* Show the installation date of activity bundles in the activity list;
* Implement search in the activity list;
* Reviewed and merged a patch contributed by Eric Burns for showing a
notification when an item is added to the clipboard;
* Reviewed and merged Eben Eliason's work for activating palettes on
right click;
* Added a palette to links in Browse. For now it allows copying the
link to the clipboard. Other features will be added to this palette
soon.

Simon worked in getting the Sucrose (See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy#Sucrose:_The_interface.2C_plus_a_set_of_demonstration_activities
release 0.81.1) out of the door (See
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Roadmap#Timeline). An announcement will
follow soon. Simon also worked on Browse Version 87, which is the
release version for Sucrose 0.81.1. It has some pylint cleanups, fixes
downloads with latest xulrunner beta5 and replaces the 'Open' label
with a 'Show in Journal' one in the download alert.

Walter Bender met with teams from Peru, Uruguay, and Paraguay to
discuss a process for in-field testing of new Sugar features. We
agreed to develop a process whereby we can conduct tests of new
features with children using Sugar on a daily basis. Details will be
posted in the wiki (See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Testing for
details as they develop).

== Sugar Labs ==

15. Walter has been in discussions with the Software Freedom Law
Center regarding how to best structure Sugar Labs such that it is
aligned with the principles of FOSS. Stay tuned.

-walter