Following up on the 'realness' event happening later this month, we will be holding a deployment focused event in July to prepare Sugar for deployment in Maine.
Last summer Sugar Labs spent a significant amount of resources, both real and emotional, on a pilot at the GPA. Now, a year later and hopefully a year smarter we are going to take another run at a US based deployment. This time the deployment will be part of the Maine 1-to-1 program. Lessons learned: 1) Hardware is hard -- At the GPA project we spent too much time dealing with hardware issues. This time we will partner with the Maine 1-to-1 program. They have successfully deployed 3000 laptops in middle and high schools in Maine. We will leverage their hardware and deployment expertise by adding Sugar to their existing program and add adding elementary schools to their target audience. 2) Don't expect a community to deal with deployment specific bugs -- on the deployment's timeline. The open source development model brings many advantages when creating an open learning platform. Customer service is not one of those advantages. As many of you may have notice, there has been an uptick in the number of deployment specific patches flowing upstream to Sugar Labs over the last couple of weeks. With Bernie's help, I have been sponsoring several local developers to fix usability issues for the Paraguay deployment. The effort has had the twin benefits of fixing issues in Paraguay and gradually acclimating the upstream developers at Sugar Labs to deal with patches from deployments. I will continue this effort by sponsoring developers to do customer service for the Maine deployment so Sugar Labs can focus on being upstream. If anyone is interesting is learning more about this particular approach to supporting a deployment I invite you to join us at http://www.fossed.com/ . david _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
