Re: [IAEP] (engineering) capacity building
We discussed recently making improvements to the Getting Involved page ( http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-June/001510.html ). I feel it would serve us to maintain job listings, on the Getting Involved page, linked to from each team's page and posted at the end of Walter's Sugar Digest: We need someone to do... I agree 100% with Tomeu that recruitment needs to be targeted to where prequalified candidates are. For example in the case of the marketing team I have built a short list of advertising industry fora, all of which have free job listings and accept nonprofits, ideal for students seeking experience. I have also identified some business school marketing professors whom I will pitch to personally for class projects. I want to start this recruitment drive in September (after my move vacation) and get contributors to work on merchandising, school visits etc. Concerning publications, the wider the reach (Ars Technica compared to LWN for example), the less likely they would let us publish a guest piece for recruitment (if anyone allowed it). Stating our case on blog planets, and word of mouth which includes IRC, in each case referring to a reworked Getting Involved page, seems to me an efficient approach for the target. Most organizations reaching a size bigger than we are now have a person doing human resources who handles recruitment in liaison with each team. I'm not worried about building a large and effective marketing team (hasn't been my priority up to now), but I share Tomeu's concerns about recruiting engineers. Sean On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Caroline Meekssolutiongr...@gmail.com wrote: I agree, we need to target for volunteers that already have the skills we need. I think there are a lot of open source developers who want to help but don't think they have the skills we need. For instance I wonder how many eJabber or Moodle developers know we need them? Our XS side is really lagging in community and I think one reason is that everyone thinks of Sugar as a desktop linux project. Perhaps if we focused on some specific areas we could use some help, defined some tasks, and asked on their mailing lists and message boards we might get some high quality volunteers who wouldn't need that much help coming up to speed. I think a lot of the development work we need to do next is on the XS and creating integration between the XS and Sugar and Activities. For instance GConpris and another even larger body of educational content both have teacher administrtion pieces that would be really helpful for classrooms if they were ported/integrated with the XS. I don't feel like the people who work in the server side code communties even know we need them. We should assess what is important to do, even if we don;t currently have the people who have the time and skills to do it, what skills we need to get it done, then let the communities that have those skills know we need them. On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 2:48 AM, David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.com wrote: One thing that comes to mind here is to guerilla market in irc channels... usually these are already full of developers and its just a matter of looking at the projects around, going to their respective channels, and let them briefly know wht sugar is and ask if they have time to spend on any other projects... still a long shot, but much more direct... David On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Tomeu Vizosoto...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Hi all, has been suggested that maybe we should code less and instead invest more time mentoring newcomers. Though this is something very sensible to suggest and a good recommendation in most occasions, I'm afraid is not what Sugar Labs needs now. I say this after more than two years welcoming developers that were attracted by the OLPC mission but that never had contact with FOSS development before: has resulted in a few very big successes but far less than expected. My suggestions are: == Send our message to channels that reach already activated people == By already activated meaning people who are already FOSS contributors or volunteers in grassroots organizations. If we grow our community of these people, we may reach a position where we can fruitfully introduce random people and help them contribute successfully. Right now we are getting ourselves known in the general public (kudos to Sean), but this is a very inefficient way of increasing our contributors base. Nor the message is appropriate for FOSS developers nor we use channels that specifically reach them. Concrete actions: publish articles in the Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mandriva, etc planets and in specialized outlets like LWN, GNOME Journal, Ars Technica, etc. making very clear our non-profit nature, governance model, educational impact, relationships to other FOSS projects, etc. == Understand better how current contributors got to contribute
Re: [IAEP] activities
Regarding BotSpeak, speak has this feature implemented as the ''robot'' toolbar (before known as sara;)), maybe is better to follow the development from there ?. Rafael Ortiz On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Aleksey Limalsr...@member.fsf.org wrote: On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 02:11:01PM +0200, Tony Anderson wrote: Wade, I posted the Quiz activity today. The git does not match exactly - I had trouble with push. I am looking forward to hearing from the team on the next steps in the release process. You can upload Quiz-1 to ASLO http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Authors and if its ready for broad audience, nominate it to the public http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Glossary#Nominated_activity otherwise just complete your activity http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Glossary#Completed_activity and email to sugar-devel@ to get feedback from users In the meantime, I am beginning to work on version 2. Yours, Tony Original Message Subject: [Fwd: activities] Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:46:27 +0200 From: Tony Anderson tony_ander...@usa.net To: Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com, Simon Schampijer si...@schampijer.de, Aleksey Lim alsr...@member.fsf.org, iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Wade, I have finally posted the ShowNTell activity to ASLO. I hope to post the Quiz activity tomorrow. The BotSpeak activity appears to be redundant. The ShowNTell activity needs a help button to show how the activity works. It also needs lots of testing on collaboration. In the meantime, I hope to get some feedback. The Quiz activity in the second version will add the capability to create a quiz on the XO and to collaborate. Collaboration should be on the same model as ShowNTell (ClassroomPresenter). I tested both activities on SoaS at LinuxTag. In both cases there are coding changes needed. Is there an approved way for an activity to test whether it is on the XO (0.82) or SoaS? The currently posted versions will only work on 0.82. Please let me know if there is more that I can do to make a proper release. Tony Original Message Subject: activities Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 10:42:20 +0545 From: Tony Anderson tony_ander...@usa.net To: Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com Wade, I have been working on some activities which are nearly ready to post. Each of them is a significant change to an existing activity. The question is whether to treat the new versions as a different activity or a later version of the original. The first is BotSpeak.activity. This activity adds the pyaiml engine so that the 'speak' character can do more than echo the input. It's default mode is compatible with speak but there is an added tab to select a bot. It could be released as BotSpeak.activity or as an upgrade to the Speak activity. I lean to introducing it as a new activity - BotSpeak. The second is ClassroomPresenter. I have added the capability to create slide decks on the XO and the ability to add voice narration to the slides. This activity is an XO version of an ongoing project at Washington State. While there does not appear to be any ongoing support of the XO, this should probably be introduced as a new activity with deserved credit going to the team at Washington State. For a new name, I would propose ShowNTell.activity. This gets a little closer to the overall goal - which is to allow the student to create and narrate a slideshow of their own pictures. The third is ImageQuiz. I have added the capability to show other types of questions (e.g. simple flashcards, spelling test (voice clip prompt, text response, ...). It will also have the Leitner feature (questions answered correctly will be shown less often). Finally, it adds the ability to edit or create quizzes on the XO and collaboration based on the ClassroomPresenter model. Support for this activity appears dormant, so I think this activity can be released as a version upgrade. Please let me know what you think about this. Also, do we have someone who reviews these activities to ensure that the i's are dotted and t's crossed when it comes to licensing? I really have very little understandng of these issues. Tony -- Aleksey ___ 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] (engineering) capacity building
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:33, Bastienbastiengue...@googlemail.com wrote: Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com writes: I agree 100% with Tomeu that recruitment needs to be targeted to where prequalified candidates are. So do I. The best tool for FOSS people is good documentation. Alan Kay repeatedly said that the user interface should be a learning interface. Think of the Sugar Labs website as a user interface: how to transform it into a learning interface? For now, documentation on how to develop Sugar activities basically sends developers outside of Sugar and the Sugar community by telling them to become python programmers first. When they are python devs, they are told to go and check pygtk or pygame first. When they are pygtk programmers they can find useful feedback on the wiki and on the mailing list on how to sugarize an activity - but it's too late, we lost 90% of potential good will by sending it outside of Sugar. Sugar should engage developers in *learning* rather than give them the impression the number of pre-requisites is high. IMHO having a more self-contained documentation could help. Adding Jeff Elkner to CC in case he has ideas about how to make this happen. Regards, Tomeu -- Bastien ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] (engineering) capacity building
Bastien schrieb: Sugar should engage developers in *learning* rather than give them the impression the number of pre-requisites is high. IMHO having a more self-contained documentation could help. I totally agree. Having such a self-contained documentation is also the reason why OLPC Austria started writing the Activity Handbook in late 2007 and it was also the motivation for the original Sugar Almanac by Faisal Anwar. On the topic of job listings I think we need to enforce some kind of template of how these are listed. When I look at the open tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk I can quickly and easily search and browse for things that might be of interest to me. That's currently not the case on sugarlabs.org (and laptop.org never managed to get it right either). So as a first step a took the liberty to copy-paste from the feature template and create a quick'n'dirty Task template at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:ChristophD/Tasks/Task_Template Christoph -- Christoph Derndorfer co-editor, olpcnews url: www.olpcnews.com e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] (engineering) capacity building
I wasn't thinking either of posting articles about recruitment on those places, rather to get our organization known. Most of the people that know that Sugar exists think we are part of OLPC, or that we have funding and a paid development team or that we have abandoned the OLPC cause and are focusing on the rich kids. Once FLOSS people know that we are a global grassroots organization working on an exciting technology that can have a bigger impact that any consumer product, we'll be in a much better position for asking for help. Well, there's no difference between getting Sugar Labs known and getting Sugar Labs known; there's just the question of targeting and how we go about it. The hard part of marketing is keeping the message clear, consistent, understandable, and attractive, then repeating it a zillion times in a million ways until it sinks in. In our launches we have been targeting tech and education journalists/bloggers and education departments/ministries; for now, with few exceptions only tech writers have written articles. However, at this point we are extremely well referenced in search engines and that's not likely to change - we are very easy to find for people who hear about us. There's no question Sugar has suffered from OLPC's image difficulties, but I firmly believe Sugar's success is good for OLPC and vice versa. Visuals and logos are key to raising unaided awareness. What most people remember about OLPC is: small $100 laptop with a crank. Many journalists and bloggers are unaware how big the installed base is, and what countries have massive deployments, and that Windows has not gone beyond pilots at this time; most know that the XO runs Linux, without further information (you have to see and touch Sugar to understand it). There are several reasons for this, but one is the scarcity of XOs outside deployments. Even single loaner machines are not as effective as they could be, because it's the networking and collaboration that demonstrates Sugar's effectiveness. The press and blogs are a very efficient way of becoming known since they are indexed and findable. We have had excellent coverage in the specialized tech press, some excellent coverage in the mainstream tech press, a small bit of coverage in the mainstream press, and no coverage in the education press that I know of. In the press releases (which are often digested verbatim in the press) we always say we are a nonprofit and the About section tells the story (we added Local Labs in the last PR footer), but even with that, many journalists in a hurry call us a company. Our website is an organic hodgepodge people get lost in and although we are nearly ready to mitigate the most serious navigation problems with the sitewide navbar, beyond that (and optimizing certain key pages) I don't advocate investing energy redoing our site at this time. With one exception: I support the suggestion of letting people try Sugar online. This could have major impact in allowing people to see and touch Sugar and, closely associated with the Sugar on a Stick download and install, and documentation including curricula support, could multiply our reach by exciting curiosity. Perhaps a design project for the SoaS v2 release? I don't think anyone who attended LinuxTag missed the Sugar Labs booth; it was an efficient way for many developers to see and touch Sugar. I had a table full of both XOs and netbooks ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/39656...@n02/3666862229/ ), everyone was curious about the XO. Since March we've had three articles in Ars Technica, two in LWN, Slashdot, etc.; there are a great many FOSS projects who have more users but less exposure. There's always a way to do better, but I'm not sure what we can do beyond what's already being done plus placing blog posts/IRC into the mix? Sean ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] (engineering) capacity building
David Farning dfarn...@sugarlabs.org writes: Of the successful not-for-profits and community organizations I have studied, one of the common threads is a near maniacal emphasis on the importance of contributors feeling the impact of their contribution on the project. I think it's easier for newcomers to step in when the work done is both collaborative and open. We certainly have a sense of openness but what about collaboration? How many activities are developed by more than one developer? How much of the core Sugar code get more than two eyes taking care of them? Maybe we could have a policy that promotes activity written by at least two developers. Maybe this can be a tool to foster more collaboration and more pedagogical interactions between us. Thus the docstrings of functions and the documentation for activities will surely increase, both in quality and quantity. Christoph and Bastien, the writers, notes that the productivity of new contributors is enhanced by good documentation. Well, I've been raised under Emacs umbrella, so I might sometimes be a bit fussy about documentation :) Anyway, Emacs illustrates what I mean by self-contained documentation: you don't need to exit Emacs to read it's documentation and to learn how to start developing stuff. Tomeu does a cost benefit analysis. (Is the cost of including and maintain this code worth the benefit it provides?) He notes that it _can_ be frustrating to engage participants who are not able to contribute in a meaning full way. Hey! Learning Python is on my todo list so I might not be such a participant anymore anytime soon :) -- Bastien ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 16, Issue 66
Caroline, It may be that sharing in Image Viewer is broken. However, I have tested sharing in View Slides and that works. What you might do is this: 1). Have the teacher download View Slides from ASLO, which will install it in her Journal. 2). If the pictures are already in her Journal she can use the Slides tab of View Slides to add these images from the Journal into a slide show. The pictures on ASLO shows how this works. She might rename the pictures to get them into sequence, which she can also do with View Slides. 3). The teacher can then share the slide show with the neighborhood. 4). The kids have to download View Slides from ASLO to the Journal. 5). They can then go to the Neighborhood and accept the invitation to Join her Activity. The slide show will be sent to them and they can navigate through it to see the pictures. I've never tested a whole classroom downloading a slide show but it works well enough one to one. If it was me I'd have the teacher prepare the slide show before the class begins and also get familiar with how View Slides works. It isn't a complicated thing to learn IMHO but in my experience all kinds of things go wrong when you demo to an audience. I've found many a bug demoing stuff to my own mother. One nice thing about View Slides is that all the images are in one Journal entry, which should simplify giving the pictures to everyone. Good luck with this, James Simmons Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:46:43 -0400 From: Caroline Meeks carol...@solutiongrove.com Subject: [IAEP] Sharing Images in the neighborhood To: Sugar Devel sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org, iaep iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Message-ID: b74fba2b0907161946o6534f0bcm6b83334baf98f...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Today we wanted to take pictures the teacher had taken with a camera and share them with the class. This turned out to be much harder then I expect. It turns out you can't just share something from your journal into the neighborhood. So we tried opening it in image viewer. Then share to neighborhood. Other person clicks on it. They get a popup from the journal asking what they want to open. Never shows what the first person opened. Is this an image viewer bug or was it designed to work this way? We ended up uploading to picasa and Anurag sent me an invite. Another bug, (this one reported) is that you can't follow links easily in google mail, by just clicking on them. However I remembered the workaround and used follow link. I then shared the bookmark. Then next bug (and this one is Google's not ours) the shared bookmark wanted people to log in, even though Anurag had made the album public. Very painful for what should have been a simple task! We need a way to get something from one journal to another without a lot of opening of other programs. Even with this work around I now have to teach the kids, goto the neighborhood, open up the shared browse, click the bookmark when it appears, download image, switch program, get image into TA. Lots of steps. Infact what happened is 25% of the class opened browse from thier home rather then the shared browse then didn't know where to go. Way simpler if we could just share a journal item with the neighborhood. Any ideas for both short term work arounds and longer term fixes? -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs market analysis
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 8:16 AM, David Farningdfarn...@sugarlabs.org wrote: Fred Grose has started an interesting wiki page at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Sugar_Labs/Roadmap discussing the Sugar Labs roadmap. Let's see whether I can add anything. Yes. I'll put the Project category on [[Creating textbooks]]. Done. One of the interesting parts of that page is the discussion about 'what is FLOSS?' In particular it highlights the communication challenges between participates in a project which crosses the Technology - Education barrier. Sugar Labs is in rather unique position. The project bridges the gap between software and education using collaborative development methodologies. On the plus side: 1. Both software development and education have strong histories of community supported successes stories. You just need to look to your local PTA and youth sports leagues to see the passion that interested parents have in their children's development. One the software side, the existence and success of projects like Linux and Fire Fox prove that community driven software development _can_ work. Also home schooling, unschooling, etc. 2. The vision and mission of Sugar Labs is extremely compelling to both groups. Many developers are intrigued by the possibility of creating a great tool to help kids learn. Educators are interested in leveraging new technologies to improve their ability to teach. On the negative side: 1. There are some pretty big cultural and language gaps between the two groups which we will have to merge. On the talk page mentioned above, it looks like Fred, wearing his developer hat, uses the acronym FLOSS Free/Libre/Open Source Software, as at FLOSS Manuals. to be synomyous with 'community driven, freely available, openly developed.' Caroline, wearing her educator hat, asks why is it a FLOS _SOFTWARE_ project? There is no generally-accepted term covering Free Software, Creative Commons content, and Open Source _hardware_. Teachers are in the content space with textbooks and other education products, and with the proposed Digital Learning Materials under Free/Open Source/CC licenses. So of course they are confused. Everybody is. I hope they both mean 'Sugar Labs the community driven education project which leverages open source software development techniques and methodologies... :) 2. There is no established market for computers in the early childhood education market. That is true within schools, and not quite entirely true in the home market. There are computerized teaching devices of many kinds for elementary grades and even pre-school. None of them is a general-purpose, user-programmable computer. There is a huge amount of software for children to use, but marketed mainly to parents, that claims to serve an educational purpose. I wrote about this market in 1981. My boss at Strategic, Inc., decided to call it edutainment. I call it shovelware. Overpriced, overhyped, and underperforming. There is, of course, real software for education going back to the 1960s, including Smalltalk and Logo. Powerful tools for powerful ideas. Unfortunately, we have failed to make them accessible to parents and teachers until now. They still have little or no idea how to use them. - aside - Market is a very overloaded word in business and economics. At one level it can refer simply to customers. On a second level. A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. The principal questions that market research were supposed to answer were o How many potential buyers, at what levels o Market share o Total revenue growth together with profiles of the technology and market strategy of the largest companies, and expected future technology developments. Regulation often came into the picture, as well. - end aside - There is no established market for computers in early childhood education for a number of reasons. It has not yet proven financially viable for existing software or hardware vendors to build a business in the market. Existing software and hardware vendors are willing and able to 'drive out' or buy out individual smaller competitors who threaten their existing markets. They have not driven out OLPC. The economics of Free Software differ greatly from the economics of manufacturing, and of proprietary software. OLPC benefits from being a non-profit, with a non-profit purpose, and from the network effects of Linux and of software for collaboration. Not only does Sugar Labs need to build the sugar product, we need to either build or encourage others to build markets around Sugar. Earth Treasury (me) has identified essential markets and opportunities in o Renewable power o Wireless Internet o Internet-enabled microfinance o Free Digital Learning Materials Each of
[IAEP] Wiki template question: {{PAGENAMEE}}
Is there a way to get this template to format better? It all comes out
on one line.
{{Special:PrefixIndex/{{PAGENAMEE}}/}}
--
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)
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Re: [IAEP] Wiki template question: {{PAGENAMEE}}
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a way to get this template to format better? It all comes out
on one line.
{{Special:PrefixIndex/{{PAGENAMEE}}/}}
It's a transclusion of the Special page,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Special:PrefixIndex, and there's no built-in
way to format it, unfortunately.
--Fred
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