One thing to remember is that a large portion of the Gates Foundation assets are in the form of Microsoft stock. As a result, the foundation will have a strong bias towards supporting Microsoft as a company.
The two biggest ideas for Sugar Labs that I got from reading the foundation inform were: 1. Education improvement is not a monopoly. If we start to think that Sugar or Sugar Labs is the _only_ means of improving education, we have some serious soul-searching to do. Education improvement is a long term proposition involving many interested parties. 2. We don't want to compete with MS. We have taken some heat for it but, one of the design goals for Sugar Labs is make it trivial to reproduce Sugar Labs. If anyone feels that Sugar Labs is headed in the wrong direction, on in danger, they can grab what ever content, source code and organizational structure they find useful and fork Sugar Labs in a couple of hours. Where do we fit in the scheme of things to make a difference? Fighting for something is inspiring, fight against something is tiring. We continue to improve Sugar as a technically, pedagogically, and practically sound learning platform. We continue to extend our outreach to educators and deployments. We continue to build Sugar Labs as a sustainable organization that will be around to improve and support Sugar over the long term. How do we measure our efforts? At this point the primary measurement I look at is the quality and size of our ecosystem. Are we attracting talented developers who are making usefull contributions. Are we attracting distributions who are willing to take on the responsibility of standing behind Sugar distributions. Are we attracting high quality deployment support organizations? Are we attracting high quality content development organizations to create learning materials. Are we attracting academics to Study Sugar and its effectiveness. Finally, and most importantly, are teachers and school districts embracing and using the Sugar learning platform. On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:25 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > Recommended reading .... to help us put into context what has already been > done and what is planned for the next year or so. > > Where do we fit in the scheme of things to make a difference? And how are > we to measure our efforts? > > ***** > From the New York Times, January 25, 2009 > > Op-ed by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF > Bill Gates's Next Big Thing > A peek into a letter Bill Gates will publish on Monday. He's not only going > to do more for health and development in the poorest nations and education > in America, he is calling for your help, too. > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/opinion/25kristof.html?ref=opinion > > ****** > > From Dennis Wong [email protected] > ________________________________ > A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
