[sugar] Fragmenting or providing a foothold?

[David Farning]

It appears that the consensus is to keep activity developers and sugar
developers united on the same ML.

Instead of talking specifically about the activities list, I would like
to talk more generally about community growth.

This discussion is premised on the belief that the future of the Sugar
Learning Platform depends on two factors: Continuing the vision of
learning through 'sharing, reflection, and exploration.'  At the same
time, we must provide enough value to technical and educational
communities that they want to support and spread this vision.

One method of implementing this vision is to evolve Sugar Labs to a
structure similar to the Eclipse Foundation[1].  At is core, Eclipse is
an open learning platform.  Sugar is an open learning platform.  The
value in Eclipse is in the ecosystem surrounding the platform; the
users, the contributors, and the developers.  The value in Sugar will be
in our ecosystem;  the students, teachers, contributors, and developers
who extend and improve the platform. 

Theses student, teacher, contributor, and developer groups will evolve
from community seeds that we plant now.  My role for the last couple of
months has been to plant and foster these communities until they are
self sustaining.  When looking for places to start and foster
communities around Sugar Labs, I have been looking for three criteria:
1.  Will the new community provide benefit to the Sugar Labs community?
Do our goal coincide?  2. Is the community growing?  3.  Is the
community developing internal leadership?

With this in mind, the goal of creating new mailing lists is not to
fragment the existing community.  It is to create footholds for other
communities to develop around the central learning platform.

thanks
dfarning  



1. http://www.eclipse.org/