Re: [IAEP] Champions Was: future of the Sugar user experience
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 01:30, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 19:23, C. Scott Ananiancsc...@cscott.net wrote: Seems reasonable: Design review in addition to code review for new patches. Like code review, make a reasonable effort to have an experienced designer or someone who knows the design for the particular area, but if the patch stalls, any designer or developer's review will do. If you care about coherent design, spent time doing design review! I'd just extend this to allow initial design review even absent a patch, so that people can get initial review before they sink too much time in an implementation. If you're confident of the basic direction, you can skip this step (your work still gets reviewed before the patch is committed upstream), but if you're uncertain you might want to post screenshots or sketches or a text description of what you want to do and have someone say, sure, that seems mostly reasonable before you start implementation. The initial review doesn't have to be nitpicky, because there are inevitably going to be things learned during the actual implementation, but it should serve to keep people from wasting too much time on ideas which are far from the desired design direction. I agree with both of Jameson and Scott, those are very interesting point of view(s) and see the value of that proposal. To complement that, we discussed at Paris the convenience of each reasonable-sized feature to have a champion that makes sure that the development of this feature keeps moving forward with the participation of all the needed people. As an example, let's say that someone named Greg Smith realizes the importance of having good tools in Sugar for discovering people to communicate with. What we currently have doesn't scale for more than a couple of dozen of people. That person doesn't need to be an engineer or an expert in HCI, but will need to have excellent communication skills, enthusiasm and the ability to transmit that enthusiasm and make other people want to work together. In this ideal scenario, the ball would start rolling by asking people already using Sugar about their opinions on that matter. Would ask to these and to other people for improvement proposals, will make a list of people that have shown interest on this issue and would periodically ping them so they feel in the loop, would see which engineers would be interested in the implementation, etc Other people that I think would make excellent feature champions are Karlie Robinson, Greg DeKoenigsberg (currently doing that for the 4th grade math project), Walter Bender (doing that for Turtle Art and other stuff), Tony Forster, Caroline Meeks (SoaS), Mel Chua, etc. Would make sense to formalize the role of feature champion and write down some guidelines to make these people even more effective? Regards, Tomeu You are exactly correct that the important piece of this puzzle is the 'champion.' As sugar Labs grows, it is getting harder and harder for everyone to keep on top of everything. Less than a year ago it seem like the same six people were attending every meeting, responding to every thread, and working on every aspect of the project. Right, at the end I think is all about scaling. It's also about having people doing what they do best, but is when we fail to scale when people overcommit and end up doing things that other people would do much better. A huge 'wow for me was Josh's new face for the activity portal. I have lost track of the activity portal development since alsroot became it's champion. I would be hesitant to make the role of champion too formal. The roles, responsibilities, and even definition of champion change with every feature and project. Agreed, what I really meant to ask is how we are going to make easier for people to realize that they are all able to take ownership of a missing piece in Sugar and push it forward until the benefits arrive to children. May not be a need to use a formal position for this, but I guess we should talk more often about it and give this role more visibility? Regards, Tomeu Instead, champion is an earned position of trust. A Champion is not the most vocal contributor, the best developer, or even the stake holder with the greatest interest. A champion is someone who can make good things happen. At meta level the entire purpose of Sugar Labs is attract, engage, and empower champions. Champions produce good results. Champions scale. david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [Marketing] [SoaS] Request for Artwork: Boot Screen
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 16:45, Sebastian Dziallassebast...@when.com wrote: Sean DALY wrote: Yes Gary by all means, the deadline is this weekend Sebastian, earlier in the thread we discussed how part of keeping a clean-looking boot involves getting more information (logos) on the About My Computer page, is that difficult to do? Sean I don't think that it would be that difficult, but it seems like this would need to be done in Sugar itself, not SoaS (which is also, why I'm not really sure how to realize it). Maybe one of the Sugar devs has an idea... Maybe you could patch the source code in the kickstart file? Would be somewhere in /usr/share/sugar/extensions/ Regards, Tomeu --Sebastian On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Sebastian, On 7 Jun 2009, at 14:37, Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Hi all, looking at the wiki page, I'm really impressed - great work! :) I also really like the idea of switching the logo color for each release - this shouldn't be hard and is an interesting approach. Has there already been some kind of agreement on which version we're going to use for the LinuxTag release? Yes I was wondering this also, given the weekend was the deadline :-) Is the one with the progress bar something everyone could agree with? FWIW, my two current favourites are the grey progress bar, or the grey circle of dots: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:XO-sugar-boot-with-progress-bar.gif http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:Refined-XO-sugar-boot-with-overlap.gif And could I possibly get the .png files, so that I can compose a new snapshot with a preview of the new boot screen (we can still change it afterwards, but I'd like to have some snapshot to test it)? I don't want to short circuit a decision making process, but let me kick out their PNGs and email to you (will do that now). That way you at least have a couple of the possible candidates to experiment/test with now. Regards, --Gary Walter: Have you heard anything regarding the use of the XO in our boot screen? Is this okay with OLPC? --Sebastian Sean DALY wrote: Actually the logo color linked to a version idea was in my long mail the other day about communicating the version :-) I too think 2 changes a year will give us time to cycle through the twelve variants. To make that work, the actual place where the version number is communicated (Control Panel / About my computer) would need to have the matching color Sugar Labs (not just Sugar) logo. I like this progress bar boot screen because: * ultrasimple, unobtrusive, fits perfectly with Sugar HIG * bar is universally easy to understand, no possibility of confusion with graphic elements. * keeping logo around that long=strong branding, which is vital for Sugar to be recognized by name rather than just the system running on XOs, netbooks, etc. I miss the iconic ring treatment though. And, no matter how clean we would like it to be, we still need to address the questions of school/sponsor co-branding (if they have a logo, they won't feel like jst putting their name in grey) and distro co-branding. Perhaps we could solve those problems by putting them in the About my computer page as well? Awful as far as co-branding goes (partners would not be happy), but will keep boot minimalist and functional. For a shining example of how more-is-less packaging is ruinous, may I direct your attention to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Gary C Marting...@garycmartin.com wrote: On 4 Jun 2009, at 16:35, Gary C Martin wrote: On 4 Jun 2009, at 15:45, Sean DALY wrote: Yes that would be very helpful I think I was just going to start tinkering again, I'll make an animated version of Eben's XO and progress-bar for evaluation. Just uploaded an animated version showing Eben's boot with progress bar treatment: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:XO-sugar-boot-with-progress-bar.gif FWIW: +1 on Eben's suggestion for changing the colour of the Sugar logo for each major new Sugar release. It nicely avoids what looks like jumping through lot's of technical burning hoops of fire, trying to set up a boot anim that dynamically changes to match the owners own colours (nice idea but I think a big ask at this point in time). FWIW2: Just incase any one was wondering, the colour dot versions were based on the 1-12 official Sugar Logo treatment colour pairs, i.e definitely not not random :-) Regards, --Gary If we can reach consensus by tomorrow and finish the actual PNG frames over the weekend we will meet the deadline but, we need a volunteer to do the frames (unless Gary what you have is nearly ready; my stuff is cut/pasted mockup no color control etc) Sure, getting a series of PNGs from any of my mock-ups is just a save for web away. Regards, --Gary thanks Sean On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Christian Marc
Re: [IAEP] Which is better for the environment recycling computers or LTSP?
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 22:19, Caroline Meekscarol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: Answer - Our vision of Sugar on a Stick! :) First off, I think on this list we probably agree that whats most important for our planets health is educated kids that grow into adults that can develop and implement and make good polical decisions around future environmentally friendly technology and find peaceful solutions to the worlds problems because war does incredible environmental damage. On this list, our means to achieve this goal is ubiquous access to Sugar, not just for an hour in the computer lab, but access that allows hours of time to explore individual interests and to create artifacts you can be proud of. But we can still think about environmental efficiency. I think Sugar on a Stick, especially the way we are going technically where you can use either LTSP or a stand alone computer with the same stick is a very green solution. LTSP saves electricity. Extending the life of old computers keeps them out of landfills and saves the power and resources used to make a new computer. At the Gardner School the computer lab is used pretty much all day and all afternoon. Call it conservatively 8 hours a day, the school is actually open 7am to 5pm at least. There is 180 school days plus 30 days of 8am-5pm. So lets say 210 days x 8 hours = 1680 hours/year. If a kid has a computer at home they will use it less then 8hours a day because they are mostly out of the house. Does anyone have any data on how many hours per day kids use their XOs outside of school? I'm going to make a guess at an average of 10 hours per week x 52 weeks per year. So that is 520 hours/year. Thus energy effieciecy is 3 times more important in the school computers then for the computers the kids use at home. If a school is in a warm climate and is air conditioned it becomes even more important. Thus as a school gets money for new computers, first it should goto LTSP for high usage computer labs and move older computers in kids homes and low usage areas. No idea what is better from the environmental POV, but from the organizational one may be great to associate with some of those NGOs that recycle computers in urban centres for redistribution in their area. It may not be easy for them to explain to some parents why having a computer at home is good for their kids, but if it was included in a bigger initiative involving also schools and SLs, that may give an extra push to their vision. Regards, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] personalisation and collaboration
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 13:00, David Van Asschedvanass...@gmail.com wrote: Something has been in the back of my head for a while now, ever since I've seen the impressive capabilities of being able to share an activity with your neighbourhood. Being able to cooperatively use applications brings a new level of playability to it all, and it reminds me of when I first saw the ability for a computer game to be 'multi-player.'This gave it an extra dimension, and with it came the idea of awards for completing certain things, which would be displayed in your dashoard somewhere.The award system seems even more relevant for education than it did for games. We'v aleady mentioned the benefits of an award sysem so I'm not going to regugitate that, but what hasnt''t really been spoken about is, how and what kind of personal details should the journal store and share. I see this as a customisable option, something that can be as simple as only sharing first names, or sharing the name of your pet, your favorite colors and foods, the languages you speak. This detailed information about a person is extremely valuable to the underlying system, as it can potentially match people against each other. This would allow for some interesting possibilities when it comes to collaboration, such as the system suggesting users to challenge/collaborate with based on personal information. I thought about having a robot that lives on an irc channel capable of helping with the collaboration procedure, as well as listing achievements, giving data on which users want to collaborate, giving help on how collaboration works with particular activities, listing which servers have open collaboration, showing the most used/highest rated collaborating activities, etc. I guess tagging of buddies is related in some measure to this? http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Roadmap/0.86#Groups Regards, Tomeu I havent thought about this too much in depth, but I know coding a bot is not too hard. I see it as an extension to the speak AI, and encouragement to join irc. We can even get the bot to accept uploads of raw learning materials categorised by subject, which can then be used by content creators. it itself could give out quizzes based on particular subjects, or interesting pieces of information/knowledge. It could be taught new information, by feeding it localised knowledge. It would be important to know where we set the limits to what it can do. Just some food for thought... David (nubae) Van Assche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Programming Needs?
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 06:15, Benjamin M. Schwartzbmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: One programming project that would help us is described in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495727 Essentially, Firefox 3.5 will ship with beautiful support for Ogg Theora+Vorbis video in every webpage, using the HTML5 video tag. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly be deadly slow on the XO and other low-power computers we care about, because it uses a pure software, completely unaccelerated playback pipeline, just like Flash. The fix is to implement a Firefox/Xulrunner extension that plays back videos in a separate window using XVideo, with the option to go full-screen, etc. For anyone familiar with Firefox extensions this would not be hard at all, and would be a big win for us, thanks to sites like openvideo.dailymotion.com. The educational implications are substantial, in my opinion. You mean to add an option to a popup menu that would open the video in, say, Jukebox? Regards, Tomeu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Which is better for the environment recycling computers or LTSP?
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 10:19 PM, Caroline Meekscarol...@solutiongrove.com wrote: But we can still think about environmental efficiency. I think Sugar on a HW is wildly over the map in environmental efficiency and risks. The software is almost incidental -- at its best it can help HW designed to be efficient achieve its design goals. I can't do much with HW that is not designed for it. I can't do anything with HW that is laden with environmental risks. So I don't think much of a statement can be made in terms of environmental impact :-/ -- OTOH, the HW is a complement to Sugar... maybe we can publish 'environmental impact assessment' howtos, charts, procurement guides, etc. Same as you'd do with any other complement to your product. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Getting data about the upgrading older machines and SoaS responsiveness.
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 13:03, James Zakijames.z...@gmail.com wrote: With regards to the speed issue. I tried SoaS on a USB2.0 (but not high-speed) memory-stick, performance was hideous on a macbook. Using a USB2.0 high-speed memory-stick, performance is great on an eeepc, which has 1G Ram. I know its not small, but its all I have to compare with for now. So from what I have experienced the USB port would be the first target. I'll hopefully get a chance to test on low-RAM school computers tomorrow. We should see why disk I/O is affecting so much performance. Instead of making the disk faster we should make Sugar stop doing stupid things (if that's indeed the case). Anybody with performance profiling of linux system can give some hints about which tools we can use to see why disk I/O seems to be the bottleneck? Thanks, Tomeu James. 2009/6/8 Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: RIPEMD160 On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 07:00:28PM -0400, Luke Faraone wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 18:43, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: It sound like another great, low impact (I am trying to think of a term like 'carbon foot print' to properly reflect the impact) way of bringing LTSP into the class room. polite or gentle perhaps? or non-invasive? Emphasizing what is avoided: invading - potentially taking over, accidentally or on purpose, the computers Granted, you would *need* to check with your local systems administrator before implementing LTSP. (as opposed to a lower-risk USB-local-booting solution) At my school, for example, netbooting a workstation starts the recloning process of loading a new Windows XP image; setting up LTSP without asking would cause major problems with their work. non-invasive to the _computers_ but invasive to the network infrastructure. So yes, a better term would be good, to not risk sysadmins feeling cheated when learning the hard way that this so-called non-invasive system includes a DHCP daemon, breaking their WiFi hotspots, printers and what not. - Jonas - -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEAREDAAYFAkosXD0ACgkQn7DbMsAkQLgTYwCeNg687lF4eEXrGw9SqB62AGih 5WQAniL/ZEmBKsZ8zVMCRmPlNnScHmE5 =lu5m -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Linuxtag - Getting involved
Hi, Linuxtag [1] is getting closer. If you are attending please add your name here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/LinuxTag2009#Attendees As some of you may have heard we will be having a booth there. Please take shifts at our booth. Ideally a shift is two persons. Helping at the booth means answering questions regarding Sugar and Sugar Labs, demoing Sugar and flashing Soas on request. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/LinuxTag2009#Sugar_Booth I have started to put up information on lodging. Hotel Funkturm sounds quite interesting. I have called them Saturday - and one 4-6 person room was left. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/LinuxTag2009#Lodging Thanks, Simon [1] 24.-27. Juni: http://www.linuxtag.org/2009/en.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Programming Needs?
Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 06:15, Benjamin M. Schwartzbmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: One programming project that would help us is described in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495727 Essentially, Firefox 3.5 will ship with beautiful support for Ogg Theora+Vorbis video in every webpage, using the HTML5 video tag. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly be deadly slow on the XO and other low-power computers we care about, because it uses a pure software, completely unaccelerated playback pipeline, just like Flash. The fix is to implement a Firefox/Xulrunner extension that plays back videos in a separate window using XVideo, with the option to go full-screen, etc. For anyone familiar with Firefox extensions this would not be hard at all, and would be a big win for us, thanks to sites like openvideo.dailymotion.com. The educational implications are substantial, in my opinion. You mean to add an option to a popup menu that would open the video in, say, Jukebox? Maybe. There are a lot of options. As a first pass, I would say, yes, there should be an option in a popup menu. It should be labeled View Full-screen, and it does just that. It could be implemented to use any standard video player plugin, like the Totem plugin we're using currently. I wouldn't say Jukebox specifically, because I'm not talking about opening it in a separate window. (Besides, video is very flexible, capable of things like streaming live video, which is not going to transfer easily to Jukebox.) This is just a first step, though. Things get much more interesting if you consider, for example, replacing every video with a big Click here to play video button that opens full-screen, or allowing the user to resize the video to less than full screen. --Ben signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [math4] Activity Awards, Activity Alerts
David, Your suggestion got me thinking about how this kind of reward system could be used with my own Activities, which involve reading. I think I have a notion which might be worth pursuing. The biggest problem with reading on the XO is finding books. The books are out there, but they're scattered all over the place. What would be good is a kind of message board that has the following features: 1). Allows learners and teachers to create their own accounts. They would need to log in to do anything on the message board. 2). You would have forums based on grade level. First graders would have a forum, second graders would have their own, etc. 3). You could do the following functions: * Submit a book review, which always would include a link to where the book could be downloaded. * Comment on someone else's review. * Award reputation points to someone else's posting. Every activity on the board would win or lose you points. Submit a new book review and you get points. Make a useful comment and those who think it useful would give you points. Report an inappropriate posting to the moderator and he could give you points for that. Make an inappropriate posting and lose points. The idea is to build a portal that links to age-appropriate books that the learners would maintain (with some adult moderation). Once you got enough reputation points you would get some meaningful and reading-related reward. Maybe your account would be granted access to the next higher forum. Or you would be allowed to download something special. Your avatar would indicate your status, so any time you make a post your post shows your current status (in other words, your status at the present moment, not your status when you made the post originally). You could also keep track of the most popular download links, etc. so kids looking for something good to read would get some ideas. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs Colombia
Great work! This is exciting stuff. Keep pinging us when and where you need help. Any issues the 'Global' Sugar community can help the Colombia with will also apply to other regional deployment. david On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerreroraf...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hello all. SugarLabs Colombia is now legally established! and we are going to tell you about what we have been doing. In the last months we have been consolidating works, making contacts, doing project proposals divulging, and seeking ways to bring the spirit of Sugar and free software to children in our country, trying to transmit our ideas (ideas that cheer us) to more people. Results have been very good so far. In this moment we have in our hands our first deployment escenario.Along with the bunaima fundation, we have a project approved by Bogota's secretary of education, for installing and using Sugar in 12 public schools: 7 from Ciudad Bolivar (María Mercedes Carranza, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Ciudad Bolívar Argentina, Bosco I, Rafael Uribe Uribe, Paraíso Manuela Beltrán y Buenos Aires) and 5 in other localities (Sorrento, Florentino González, Marco Fidel Suárez, San Pablo y Morisco). In these schools Sugar will be installed in informatics classrooms of primary grades. This step is the continuity of a process begun with 30 professors, which have been already trained on Sugar use. Now with the possibility of having installed software, we are starting our second phase: making a follow-up of classroom works using investigation projects as pedagogical tool. Next six months will be accompanying professors in their use of Sugar for classes development and we will be helping them with use of wikis, blogs ans LMS (i.e moodle) . towards the end of this process we hope that teachers will be an active part of Sugar's community and we hope to have results of projects made by children of these schools. Of course we are counting that this experience can be replicated on other institutions and schools of Bogota and Colombia. We will be telling you the advances and difficulties in this process. Regards, Rafael Ortiz ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Champions Was: future of the Sugar user experience
Yes, that make a lot of sense. I think the biggest piece for you personally is to become comfortable doing the asking:) It really doesn't take too long to get a feel for who 'gets' the Sugar culture. david On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 4:24 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 01:30, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 19:23, C. Scott Ananiancsc...@cscott.net wrote: Seems reasonable: Design review in addition to code review for new patches. Like code review, make a reasonable effort to have an experienced designer or someone who knows the design for the particular area, but if the patch stalls, any designer or developer's review will do. If you care about coherent design, spent time doing design review! I'd just extend this to allow initial design review even absent a patch, so that people can get initial review before they sink too much time in an implementation. If you're confident of the basic direction, you can skip this step (your work still gets reviewed before the patch is committed upstream), but if you're uncertain you might want to post screenshots or sketches or a text description of what you want to do and have someone say, sure, that seems mostly reasonable before you start implementation. The initial review doesn't have to be nitpicky, because there are inevitably going to be things learned during the actual implementation, but it should serve to keep people from wasting too much time on ideas which are far from the desired design direction. I agree with both of Jameson and Scott, those are very interesting point of view(s) and see the value of that proposal. To complement that, we discussed at Paris the convenience of each reasonable-sized feature to have a champion that makes sure that the development of this feature keeps moving forward with the participation of all the needed people. As an example, let's say that someone named Greg Smith realizes the importance of having good tools in Sugar for discovering people to communicate with. What we currently have doesn't scale for more than a couple of dozen of people. That person doesn't need to be an engineer or an expert in HCI, but will need to have excellent communication skills, enthusiasm and the ability to transmit that enthusiasm and make other people want to work together. In this ideal scenario, the ball would start rolling by asking people already using Sugar about their opinions on that matter. Would ask to these and to other people for improvement proposals, will make a list of people that have shown interest on this issue and would periodically ping them so they feel in the loop, would see which engineers would be interested in the implementation, etc Other people that I think would make excellent feature champions are Karlie Robinson, Greg DeKoenigsberg (currently doing that for the 4th grade math project), Walter Bender (doing that for Turtle Art and other stuff), Tony Forster, Caroline Meeks (SoaS), Mel Chua, etc. Would make sense to formalize the role of feature champion and write down some guidelines to make these people even more effective? Regards, Tomeu You are exactly correct that the important piece of this puzzle is the 'champion.' As sugar Labs grows, it is getting harder and harder for everyone to keep on top of everything. Less than a year ago it seem like the same six people were attending every meeting, responding to every thread, and working on every aspect of the project. Right, at the end I think is all about scaling. It's also about having people doing what they do best, but is when we fail to scale when people overcommit and end up doing things that other people would do much better. A huge 'wow for me was Josh's new face for the activity portal. I have lost track of the activity portal development since alsroot became it's champion. I would be hesitant to make the role of champion too formal. The roles, responsibilities, and even definition of champion change with every feature and project. Agreed, what I really meant to ask is how we are going to make easier for people to realize that they are all able to take ownership of a missing piece in Sugar and push it forward until the benefits arrive to children. May not be a need to use a formal position for this, but I guess we should talk more often about it and give this role more visibility? Regards, Tomeu Instead, champion is an earned position of trust. A Champion is not the most vocal contributor, the best developer, or even the stake holder with the greatest interest. A champion is someone who can make good things happen. At meta level the entire purpose of Sugar Labs is attract, engage, and empower champions. Champions produce good results. Champions scale. david ___ IAEP --
[IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Ambassadors
Hey all, Below is a thread on Sugar ambassadors from last week. I meant to send it to iaep with a few follow on cc's. Looks like I left off iaep. david -- Forwarded message -- From: David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:59 PM Subject: Sugar Ambassadors To: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com, Walter Bender wal...@sugarlabs.org We have hinted around the edges several times about the importance of an ambassadors program for Sugar Labs. The basic idea behind the ambassadors programs is to help people such as Caryl feel like they have what they need to effectively communicate to various groups about Sugar and Sugar Labs. At some levels this is a marketing issue but at other levels, this is a community building issue. I am willing to get the program started. I would like to hand it off to someone with actual social skills as soon as possible. At the OLPCFrance day of SugarCamp, I was much more comfortable sitting upstairs with Scott Meeks and Gary Martin than talking and mingling. We can start by collecting a list of interesting events and a set of inspiring resources. From there we can organically let the natural 'ambassadors' learn what works for their local events and share those best practices with each other. Should we roll this into the marketing team for now and split off when we get to big for the marketers to handle us? Yep, that is a challenge:) david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Ambassadors
I appreciate the Fedora Ambassadors concept as I understand it but I am not sure it's the best approach for Sugar Labs... it seems to me more oriented towards contributor recruitment... the fedora press page for example invites journalists to get involved, which is on-topic for contributor recruitment but is misses by a mile the fact that journalists, analysts and bloggers cannot get involved in *anything* they cover due to conflict of interest; the best one should hope for is a fair shake. Events such as FOSDEM, FOSS VT, LinuxTag, FOSS ED, NECC DC are an amazingly efficient way to change influential minds, but they are expensive to go to and difficult to attend when there are so few of us. We seem to have an Events Calendar (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Events#Sugar_Labs_Events), but I'm not sure it's in use... it would be the logical departure point for in-person recruitment efforts. Now, I certainly agree that contributor recruitment is key for us and I think every team could use more hands, but I would venture that we need to choose another priority: getting feedback from schools where we are and getting into schools where we aren't. In particular, we need teacher-contributors to bridge the wide gap between our development efforts and classrooms with Learners. I have been monitoring the varied OLPC project field studies for some time and I am struck by a nearly universal aspect: the study authors don't invest the time necessary to learn how to use Sugar and so miss its benefits (most studies don't even cite Sugar). Time after time we hear about kids at school chatting on their mesh network, taking and swapping photos, writing together... and the difficulties of teachers to cover learning subjects. The evidence seems to indicate that teachers are slower at learning than grownups (there's truth in that; my 4-year old son completed 8 mazes in a row yesterday with no assistance, more than I ever have), but I would suggest there is another factor: there is no defined teacher computer in the OLPC architecture aside from an XO. I don't mean an XS school server as I understand it, but a bigger screen/keyboard machine running Sugar on the teacher's desk. With increased authority status, an admin for Learners? It's open to debate given Sugar's theoretical underpinnings, but my personal feeling is that providing teachers with tools (say, deactivating video filming in the class when work needs to get done, reactivating after) will have a positive impact on teacher buy-in and recommendations. This by the way is right in line with the nascent Education Team (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Education_Team)... its mission is to reach out to teachers and to assist those doing so; I say our best ambassadors will be on that team... ideally, technically adept teachers talking to other teachers... because the Sugar-GNU/Linux stack, not being preinstalled, does require some technical hurdle-jumping. SoaS is designed to reduce these technical barriers and will succeed its ambitious goals as its relatedsupport materials become available, but non-XO preinstalled Sugar is not on the horizon yet and until then, teachers need helpers. So... although marketing does cover all aspects of communication (from booth swag, to sales points flyers, from publicist work with journalists to the Learner-GUI interaction experience), and as marketers we will always be thinking of branding and strategy, I think the way forward is to build on the Education team... start by recruiting a teacher to coordinate it... and take it from there. I'd be interested in participating in those meetings, but I feel a teacher will have far more credibility explaining Sugar to other teachers than marketers (or developers or... :-) will. By the way this could be a handle to contact K-8 bloggers... tell them that Sugar Labs seeks a teacher coordinator and ask them the best way to go about finding one? Finally, I want to mention the snowball effect... it will become far easier to recruit contributors as Sugar becomes more widespread. We are on track to do that, with great code and a coherent marketing message. Sean. On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 10:58 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey all, Below is a thread on Sugar ambassadors from last week. I meant to send it to iaep with a few follow on cc's. Looks like I left off iaep. david -- Forwarded message -- From: David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:59 PM Subject: Sugar Ambassadors To: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com, Walter Bender wal...@sugarlabs.org We have hinted around the edges several times about the importance of an ambassadors program for Sugar Labs. The basic idea behind the ambassadors programs is to help people such as Caryl feel like they have what they need to effectively communicate to various groups about Sugar and Sugar Labs. At some levels this is a
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Ambassadors
I volunteer to help organize this, and to be the Ambassador to several groups, including state governments, textbook writers, and education researchers. The reason is that I am doing those things already. I am in contact with Gov. Pat Quinn's office in Illinois; Obama education advisor Linda Darling-Hamilton at Stanford; and the people and organizations listed on the [[Creating textbooks]] page, among others. Some of us expect to have some announcements over the summer. Let's start thinking about the stakeholders we need to bring into the process. o Teachers o Ed. schools o Politicians o School Boards o Students o Parents o Textbook authors and publishers o Software developers o Subject-matter experts o Curriculum developers as individuals and organizations, in each case. Who else? On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 1:58 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey all, Below is a thread on Sugar ambassadors from last week. I meant to send it to iaep with a few follow on cc's. Looks like I left off iaep. david -- Forwarded message -- From: David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:59 PM Subject: Sugar Ambassadors To: Caryl Bigenho cbige...@hotmail.com, Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com, Walter Bender wal...@sugarlabs.org We have hinted around the edges several times about the importance of an ambassadors program for Sugar Labs. The basic idea behind the ambassadors programs is to help people such as Caryl feel like they have what they need to effectively communicate to various groups about Sugar and Sugar Labs. At some levels this is a marketing issue but at other levels, this is a community building issue. I am willing to get the program started. I would like to hand it off to someone with actual social skills as soon as possible. At the OLPCFrance day of SugarCamp, I was much more comfortable sitting upstairs with Scott Meeks and Gary Martin than talking and mingling. We can start by collecting a list of interesting events and a set of inspiring resources. From there we can organically let the natural 'ambassadors' learn what works for their local events and share those best practices with each other. Should we roll this into the marketing team for now and split off when we get to big for the marketers to handle us? Yep, that is a challenge:) david ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Getting data about the upgrading older machines and SoaS responsiveness.
With regards to the speed issue. I tried SoaS on a USB2.0 (but not high-speed) memory-stick, performance was hideous on a macbook. Using a USB2.0 high-speed memory-stick, performance is great on an eeepc, which has 1G Ram. I know its not small, but its all I have to compare with for now. So from what I have experienced the USB port would be the first target. I'll hopefully get a chance to test on low-RAM school computers tomorrow. James. 2009/6/8 Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: RIPEMD160 On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 07:00:28PM -0400, Luke Faraone wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 18:43, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: It sound like another great, low impact (I am trying to think of a term like 'carbon foot print' to properly reflect the impact) way of bringing LTSP into the class room. polite or gentle perhaps? or non-invasive? Emphasizing what is avoided: invading - potentially taking over, accidentally or on purpose, the computers Granted, you would *need* to check with your local systems administrator before implementing LTSP. (as opposed to a lower-risk USB-local-booting solution) At my school, for example, netbooting a workstation starts the recloning process of loading a new Windows XP image; setting up LTSP without asking would cause major problems with their work. non-invasive to the _computers_ but invasive to the network infrastructure. So yes, a better term would be good, to not risk sysadmins feeling cheated when learning the hard way that this so-called non-invasive system includes a DHCP daemon, breaking their WiFi hotspots, printers and what not. - Jonas - -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEAREDAAYFAkosXD0ACgkQn7DbMsAkQLgTYwCeNg687lF4eEXrGw9SqB62AGih 5WQAniL/ZEmBKsZ8zVMCRmPlNnScHmE5 =lu5m -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Ambassadors
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Sean DALYsdaly...@gmail.com wrote: I appreciate the Fedora Ambassadors concept as I understand it but I am not sure it's the best approach for Sugar Labs... it seems to me more oriented towards contributor recruitment... the fedora press page for example invites journalists to get involved, which is on-topic for contributor recruitment but is misses by a mile the fact that journalists, analysts and bloggers cannot get involved in *anything* they cover due to conflict of interest; the best one should hope for is a fair shake. Fedora ambassadors focus on contributor recruitment because that is Fedora's primary goal. A community of strong contributors working towards a shared mission, make fedora awesome is their goal. Events such as FOSDEM, FOSS VT, LinuxTag, FOSS ED, NECC DC are an amazingly efficient way to change influential minds, but they are expensive to go to and difficult to attend when there are so few of us. We seem to have an Events Calendar (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Events#Sugar_Labs_Events), but I'm not sure it's in use... it would be the logical departure point for in-person recruitment efforts. Yep, not enough people to properly tend the calendar much less attend the events. Now, I certainly agree that contributor recruitment is key for us and I think every team could use more hands, but I would venture that we need to choose another priority: getting feedback from schools where we are and getting into schools where we aren't. In particular, we need teacher-contributors to bridge the wide gap between our development efforts and classrooms with Learners. I have been monitoring the varied OLPC project field studies for some time and I am struck by a nearly universal aspect: the study authors don't invest the time necessary to learn how to use Sugar and so miss its benefits (most studies don't even cite Sugar). Time after time we hear about kids at school chatting on their mesh network, taking and swapping photos, writing together... and the difficulties of teachers to cover learning subjects. The evidence seems to indicate that teachers are slower at learning than grownups (there's truth in that; my 4-year old son completed 8 mazes in a row yesterday with no assistance, more than I ever have), but I would suggest there is another factor: there is no defined teacher computer in the OLPC architecture aside from an XO. I don't mean an XS school server as I understand it, but a bigger screen/keyboard machine running Sugar on the teacher's desk. With increased authority status, an admin for Learners? It's open to debate given Sugar's theoretical underpinnings, but my personal feeling is that providing teachers with tools (say, deactivating video filming in the class when work needs to get done, reactivating after) will have a positive impact on teacher buy-in and recommendations. This by the way is right in line with the nascent Education Team (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Education_Team)... its mission is to reach out to teachers and to assist those doing so; I say our best ambassadors will be on that team... ideally, technically adept teachers talking to other teachers... because the Sugar-GNU/Linux stack, not being preinstalled, does require some technical hurdle-jumping. SoaS is designed to reduce these technical barriers and will succeed its ambitious goals as its relatedsupport materials become available, but non-XO preinstalled Sugar is not on the horizon yet and until then, teachers need helpers. So... although marketing does cover all aspects of communication (from booth swag, to sales points flyers, from publicist work with journalists to the Learner-GUI interaction experience), and as marketers we will always be thinking of branding and strategy, I think the way forward is to build on the Education team... start by recruiting a teacher to coordinate it... and take it from there. I'd be interested in participating in those meetings, but I feel a teacher will have far more credibility explaining Sugar to other teachers than marketers (or developers or... :-) will. And how do we recruit that teacher? It looks like we have come full circle to 'contributor who contributes by identifying and engaging other smart and passionate contributors.' I guess we could put ambassadors inside the human resources team:) david By the way this could be a handle to contact K-8 bloggers... tell them that Sugar Labs seeks a teacher coordinator and ask them the best way to go about finding one? Finally, I want to mention the snowball effect... it will become far easier to recruit contributors as Sugar becomes more widespread. We are on track to do that, with great code and a coherent marketing message. Sean. On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 10:58 PM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hey all, Below is a thread on Sugar ambassadors from last week. I meant to send it to iaep with
