I, David Farning, would like to announce my candidacy for a position on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.
As a member on the original Sugar Labs Oversight Board, I came to feel that as much as I believed in the vision of OLPC and Sugar Labs there were a number of needs in the ecosystem which could be met by a third organization. 1. The voice and needs of deployments were being over shadowed by the global voice of Sugar Labs and OLPC. 2. There was no organization provide service and support for deployments. As a result, deployments required a significant amount of technical sophistication before they could get started. 3. Because of the volunteer nature of Sugar Labs, developers tended to work on the interesting and innovative problems rather than the daily grind necessary to deliver a fully polished educational platform. For the past two years I, and a number of other developers, have been establishing Activity Central [1] to help fill the above needs. Our model is to provide technical service and support to deployments. This effort has resulted in the Dextrose [2] operation system which we custom develop and support for several large and small deployment. Because we depend on customer revenue for our sustainability we have a strong incentive to meet the software needs of deployments. Because Dextrose is based on Upstream Sugar and OLPC OS releases Activity Central has a strong incentive to assist in the continued success of Sugar Labs and OLPC. To this end we have made a number of commitments: 1. All code written by Activity Central developers will be released with an open source license. 2. Activity Central developers spend 60% of their time on revenue generating work. They are free to spend the remaining 40% of their time on projects which are of general value to the ecosystem. 3. Activity Central supports a Community Architect whose job is identify and support local and global communities that are valuable parts of the Sugar Labs and OLPC ecosystem. >From time to time I am asked why I chose to form a third organization rather than work within Sugar Labs or OLPC. A third global organization brings several advantages to the ecosystem: 1. It promotes cooperative decision making. When the ecosystem consisted of two primary participants, Sugar Labs and OLP, there was a tendency for competitive decision making. When a third player was added to the mix, the value of cooperative decision making become more apparent. 2. Organizations with a business focus often provide value to a Free Software ecosystem. Interestingly OLPC-A has seen this and has been shifting toward a 'social entrepreneurship' model. 3. Activity Central approaches the ecosystem from a different viewpoint than either sugar Labs or OLPC. As global innovators both Sugar Labs' and OLPC's strengths are top down. Ideas and Implementations flow down from the central organization to deployments and users. As a service provider, most of Activity Central's ideas and implementation flow up from deployments and user. Our work flow is to solve issues faced by individual deployments which we generalize and push upstream. thank you, David Farning 1. http://activitycentral.com/ 2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep