[cc += i...@] Here's a revised version integrating some feedback from marketing@:
-----8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----- Does the world know that Sugar Labs is still 100% committed to support Sugar? We got nearly zero press coverage lately, and the only message that everybody got is that OLPC ditched the development of Sugar, and the general mood is pretty negative. Perhaps we should be much louder in telling people about a few facts that would sound surprising outside our small circle and even within it: - Sugar's development infrastructure is now mostly independent of OLPC, thanks to many generous partners (Ivan, OSL, Free Software Foundation, prgmr.com, MIT Media Lab, Solution Groove, Collabora and Develer); - For about 3 months now, Sugar Labs has already been taking care of Sugar development with almost no support from OLPC; - Sugar has not lost any of its full-time core developers as a consequence of OLPC's layoffs. - All of the core team will stay around as unpaid volunteers while we're looking for new ways to finance their full-time contribution; - Today, development of Sugar and activities relies upon 20 active contributors (we actually have 30 user accounts on sunjammer, but some of them don't count as contributors of any kind); - Over the past few months, we have grown our community with new contributors, new partners and new distributors; - The rate of development seems to be increasing steadily as we consolidate our new community driven development model (we can obtain some support evidence from git); - Through the SFC, Sugar Labs is receiving some very generous support (although we're not yet able to credit individual donors); - While we do not plan to hire a development team within Sugar Labs, we're working to get some of our full-time volunteer contributors sponsored by external organizations; - Red Hat and Solutions Groove are contributing with engineering resources and covering traveling expenses for some of our members; - The development cycle is proceeding steadily and 0.84 will be released as planned in March; - We've been working to establish Local Labs, grassroots organizations which, in our mind, will fill up the gap left by OLPC in deployments; It's starting to become clear that 0.84 is where we'll prove our credibility as a self-sufficient, community-driven project. -----8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----- To the best of my knowledge, all the above corresponds to reality. Can anyone spot any factual mistake I should correct, or things we'd better avoid saying? Am I being exaggeratedly positive anywhere? Anyone who has contacts with local or international press agencies is invited to help us deliver this message effectively. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://www.sugarlabs.org/ _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
