[sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-11-17

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Planes, trains, and automobiles: While everyone else has been
preparing for SugarCamp, I've been traveling across Europe, fulfilling
some prior commitments. "If it is Monday, this must be Tampere." I had
a chance to attend a gathering of the Indo-German Business Forum
(http://pratham.de/?p=12) sponsored by Pratham e.V. in Düsseldorf and
garnered a lot of interest in the use and support of Sugar in the
subcontinent. (Pratham's goal: "Every child in school… and learning
well.") I also had a chance to address the free software community at
a meeting in Bolzano, Italy, where my theme was the why—not just the
how—of Sugar and free software: the appropriation of knowledge within
the context of a critical dialog is a powerful model for both learning
and software development. I'm in Finland now, fulfilling my
obligations as a visiting faculty member at the University of Tampere.
I taught a class on journalism and open systems. (In a life before
Sugar, I was the running a program at MIT called "News in the
Future".) The gist of the program was discuss: our many mistakes from
the past and the opportunities afforded by open communication, open
knowledge, and open media—concepts that my generation seems to
struggle with, but are second nature to the youth of Finland and
probably youths everywhere.

2. Regional Sugar Labs have been a topic of discussion on each stop in
my travels (and also in my recent trip to Peru). A distributed
project—we chose to name Sugar Labs, plural deliberately—where there
is a local sense of ownership and associated entrepreneurship feels
like the right course for us as an organization. Sugar Labs "central"
is the community itself, which would be responsible for setting clear
goals and maintaining any necessary infrastructure needed by the
project as a whole, while the regional labs would use the own means to
make Sugar relevant to their local communities. But what is the
"business model" for a successful Sugar Lab? It seems that some
necessary conditions for success would be:

* a university connection as a local human resource
* a local pilot user group to learn from
* a local passion or sub-goal that provides a rational for the work.

What are other considerations? And are these initial "conditions" correct?

3. The impact of Sugar: We need to be able to communicate the impact
of Sugar on learning. Some measures are beginning to come in from the
field, e.g., the report from Peru I cited last week, however, more
concrete numbers and stories of how Sugar has positively change
individual lives would be of great value to the project. The audience
of these communications are the free software community, educators,
educational researchers and activists, philanthropies that can help
support the efforts of these groups, and organizations that want to
build products or service on top of Sugar (either for or not for
profit). Put your stories in the wiki or share them on the mailing
lists.

4. In a related thread, Babu Ram Poudel, deputy director of the
department of education in Nepal has posted a white paper entitled "On
Using Digital Curriculum and OLPC in Nepal" in order to initiate
discussion. I've asked them to post the paper in a public place so
that the Sugar community can provide feedback.

5. Just because it is cool: Daniel Ajoy sent this link to the OLPC Sur
list (http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/OddPics/Eclipse.html). Wow.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

6. First National Volunteer Network Support Plan Ceibal: On November
15 there was the first national meeting of the  registered volunteers
(RAP) for Plan Ceibal, the Sugar/OLPC deployment in Uruguay. The
meeting was attended by 300 volunteers, with representatives from 17
departments around the country. The citizens of Uruguay are very
active in their efforts to ensure that their national project is a
success. It is great that the project is so open to the volunteer
community.

7. Sugar Camp is underway in Cambridge (See http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp).

8. Mashup Camp Mountain View will be held on 17–19 November (See
http://www.mashupcamp.com/mountain-view-november/).

=== Sugar Labs ===

9. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-November-8-14-som.jpg). It is great
that the peak in the center of the image is a cluster of "Sugar",
"Work", "Make", and "Think".

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