David, I'm going to assume you meant to cc the list, I apologize if
that's not the case.
I agree with both of your points. As I've said earlier my associations
with sugar and children are not positive. In fact, I believe it
will be easier to build an association between Sugar Labs and
children. And, teacher buuy-in - and that includes teachers on a
digital learning curve - is essential.
Sean
On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:25 PM, David Ally david_a...@yahoo.com wrote:
Well all point noted, but remember the so called global poor kids don't
even have access to chocolate, they're poor and hardly have access to things
like that, those things (chocolate and co) are for up-town babies.
But, since the point here is to separate sugar from the XO platform, and
make it more platform agnostic, why not just emphasize that and leave every
other issues alone.
Now, i have not really tried sugar on stick up till now, but i have tried
sugar Livecd on Ubuntu linux, and it loaded fine and i think it is cool with
the various new learning and teaching paradigms it tries to encourage,
they're quite encouraging. However, the emphasis is always on the learners,
and in most cases we implied the pupils, but we've forgotten that if
developing countries are among the target, then there's a miscalculation as
to who the real laerner is, i think it is the so called teachers, and that
is why we are proposing and pushing a capacity building effort in Africa
that focuses on both the implied learners, and teacher learners. Don't
forget, most of these teachers are not digital generation kids.
We're glad for what all the open source community are doing and should
invite active players at the launch of our projects soon. All efforts to get
digital lifestyle into education is well appreciated.
David
From: Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com
To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; Sugar Labs Marketing
market...@lists.sugarlabs.org; josh williams j...@tucson-labs.com; Jonas
Smedegaard d...@jones.dk
Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2009 8:48:39 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Topics deliverables from Marketing IRC meeting
03-03-2009: Sugar 8.4 launch date set!
Josh - reaching hundreds of thousands of teachers and parents is
different from talking with half a dozen distributions (and OEMs too),
and of course we need to do both - and we are. That said, I am
convinced the more Sugar succeeds,the more distributions will be
encouraged to include and promote it. They are aware of a key
differentiator, that Sugar is free software and lives best on
GNU/Linux.
Jonas - what I want is to reach teachers and parents with the message
that Sugar is a good choice for children. A key way to do that is to
spread the news that Sugar works on other classroom-friendly hardware
platforms. Teacher buy-in is essential for Sugar's success on non-OLPC
platforms. Although some educators have likely heard of OLPC, it's
likely very few have heard of Sugar Labs. Of those who have, like it
or not, we are facing perception problems today: that OLPC/Sugar is
floundering, that Sugar only works on the XO-1, that the restructuring
has sounded the death knell for Sugar and active development is
winding down, etc. Marketing is about perceptions and it's not stinky
to combat false perceptions with a key fact, that Sugar runs on
netbooks. perhaps it's a better idea to call out that Sugar runs well
on older desktop PCs, which are more likely to be in the back of
classrooms; it's a choice. I just think talking up netbooks better
advances Sugar's image of modernity and innovation.
We are hampered by a numbering system that implies work-in-progress
status. However, we can use that to our advantage by stressing that
Sugar on a Stick will be our big product 1.0 launch, and therefore not
overselling it at this time. I'm sorry, but I don't see how obscure
marketing will help us reach the goal of communicating that Sugar runs
on lots of other machines now.
Sean
On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote:
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[sent again - to the marketing team too this time]
On Sat, Mar 07, 2009 at 01:36:37AM +0100, Sean DALY wrote:
Bert made a very astute observation: we need to be Googlable. Luke is
quite right, Sugar by itself is ungooglable and Sugar needs Labs
close by in this context.
Searching just for the single word sugar in Google have Sugar Labs
rank 6th in my experience, and OLPC Sugar page ranks 4th.
Jonas makes the excellent suggestion to baptise the version with a
name. It's a good way to reduce the importance of the version number
in communicating. I fear that unfortunately, honoring chocolate barons
may not be the best path... the biggest names were part and parcel of
the colonial era :-( and some names including Van Houten are
registered trademarks which will be zealously protected so off-limits
:-(
Do you say that Chocolate companies have
