Product. Check. Delivery Mechanism. Check. Customers hmmm.
Last week I sent out a community outreach update in which I stated that engaging the education community was blocked until we could put livecds into educators hands. Happily, I can now say that I was wrong. The challenge is how to get Sugar onto the computers that are in fornt of children. My background is technology, so I was looking at problem as a matter of pushing the technology downstream. Instead, we can look at the problem as matter of having teachers pull the technology into the classroom. At this point we have a reasonable piece of software. The Sugar desktop is functional and there are a couple of demonstration activities. Our developers are doing a good job getting organized. It won't be long until we get a into a innovate-stabilize cadence which will allow us to develop an excellent piece of software at good pace. We have a delivery mechanism, the Linux distributions. Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu all do one thing very well. They deliver software. The olpc-team at Fedora is gaining ground at an amazing rate. The sugar-team in the .deb side of the fence is also doing well. The education spins have not been doing so well. Skolelinux is establishing a pretty good foothold in Northern Europe. But other spins are less far along. Rather then use the education spins to push, we can use the education communities to pull. Some of the education communities that seem promising are: 1. Constructionist. 2. Collaboration oriented. There are many communities springing up around collaboration oriented technologies such as Moodle. 3. Open Source. There is a small, but growing number of organization based around spreading FLOSS in the school systems. 4. On-line. There are numerous organizations involved in online development of lesson plans and books. I would say our next step is to start engaging these organizations in figuring out how they can best use Sugar in their own classrooms. I am not naive enough to believe that we will get widespread adoption overnight using this method. But, the listen, learn, improve, release model of open source development is a natural fit. dfarning _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
