[Sugar-devel] Private vs Public conversations.

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:56 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think we should be having this discussion with the Sugar
deployments. They by-and-large remain committed to Sugar even if they
are uncertain about the base platform.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org