[Sur] Sugar Digest 2016-05-04

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. One of my favorite Marvin Minsky stories took place in the mid 1990s.
Marvin and I had to meet someone at the bar at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in
downtown Boston. Marvin, as was his habit, was wearing a vest -- one with
large, useful pockets. As we started to walk into the bar, we were stopped
and told that we needed neckties in order to enter. Marvin told the doorman
that we had to go in for a meeting, but that we did not have neckties. The
doorman very graciously offered to lend us neckties. He momentarily stepped
into the cloakroom and returned with two ties; he offered one to each of
us. Marvin took a tie, said "thank you", wrapped it around his waist, and
walked into the bar.

2. Help me in welcoming our six summer interns from the Google Summer of
Code program: Yash Agarwal, Vikram Ahuja, Abhijit Patel, Hemant Kasat,
Jeremie Amsellem, and Utkarsh Tiwari. Yash will be working on a Font Editor
Activity under the mentorship of Dave Crossland and Eli Heuer. Vikram is
working with Tymon Radzik and me on a GIT Backend for activities. Abhijit
is working with Sam Parkinson on a "Journal Rethink". Hemant is working
with Devin Ulibarri on adding some new widgets to Music Blocks. Jeremie is
working with Lionel Laské and Michaël Ohayon on Sugarizer. Utkarsh is
working with Tony Anderson and Sebastian Silva on "Sugar on the Ground", a
series of enhancements to Sugar in support of small and off-line
deployments.

We'll be meeting as a group on Fridays at 12:00 UTC beginning in late May
on irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting. Feel free to join us.

We had many more quality proposals than slots. I'd like thank everyone who
applied this year and hope that even if you were not among the selected
projects, you will continue to contribute to the Sugar Labs community.

=== In the Community ===

3. We have a Sugar Labs oversight board meeting on Friday, 6 May, at 16:00
UTC (See [1]) The agenda [2] includes:
* Motion to pay for laboratoriosazucar.org domain (See [3])
* Motions to create Treasurer position (See [4])
* Motion to do Yoruba i18n (See [5])
* Motion to update the Sugar License from GPLv2 to GPLv3 (See [6])
* Proposal to make GSoC mentor payments to the mentors.
* Google RISE grant (See [7])
* Motion to adopt Vision proposal 2016 (See [8])

Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting.

4. I was busy with Music Blocks workshops in April: at the Boston Coding
Camp; the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester (with Mariah Noelle Villarreal)
and the Walsh Middle School in Framingham, MA (with Pascal Chesnais).

5. Dave Crossland has organized a WIKI gardening party for the weekend of
May 14-15. Those who are in the Boston area will meet together at my office
at MIT, W31-302. We'll see more of you on line as well as we attempt to
prune deprecated pages and ensure the content is up to date. We'll also be
migrating some content to www.sugarlabs.org.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Sebastian Silva announced last week some progress on running Sugar
Activities from the GNU/Linux desktop. He patched sugar-toolkit-gtk3 [9] to
enable activities to run using sugar-activity script (tested in Gnome, XFCE
and Sugar itself).

Sebastian also created a notification-tray applet that allows one to start
activities and even invoke journal items (See [10]). More details are
available at [11].

=== Sugar Labs ===

7. Please visit our planet [12].

----

1.
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Sugar+Labs+oversight+board+meeting&iso=20160506T16&p1=1440&ah=1
2. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Minutes#Agenda_items
3. http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2016-May/018096.html
4.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16jIFuZ9bX-Bv675BpA1KmcEcRcX4PRCOUEX0ICRUkOc/edit
5.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz5r4d6qh-WsZXRvZVdjTzRsUWNZN3YtWlQ3M3o5R2ZSQUl3/view?usp=sharing
6. https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/685
7. https://www.google.com/edu/resources/programs/google-rise-awards
8. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vision_proposal_2016
9. https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/315
10. https://github.com/icarito/sugar-launcher-applet
11. https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/FreeDesktop_integration
12. http://planet.sugarlabs.org

-walter

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