Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting

[David Farning]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:29 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
> David - what I meant was, no strategic partnership between the distros.
> Ubuntu wouldn't pose so many difficulties if M. Shuttleworth/Canonical got
> behind Sugar for example.

In my conversations with Shuttleworth and Redhat they were both pretty
upset that they were forced to bid against each other to be part of
the OLPC project. Whoever donated more got to be part of the
project the other was ignored.

That, on top of Ubuntu's screw ups in the education sector (
Canoncial, tried to assume too much control over the community lead
Edubuntu project) have left education, and sugar in particular,
struggling at Ubuntu.

> Sean
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:46 AM, David Farning
>  wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 3:07 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
>> > I'm sorry Sebastian, yes I should have been more clear about which
>> > Sebastian
>> > :-)
>> >
>> > At the time, Sugar was perceived as being only available on OLPC XOs, so
>> > our
>> > effort was designed to show that it was available for other platforms.
>> > Indeed, our claim has always been that it was hardware-agnostic (on Mac
>> > using virtualization), cf. our press releases (sl.o/press). And, SoaS as
>> > a
>> > marketing concept was meant to be distro-agnostic too (SuSE...), a
>> > position
>> > fought tooth and nail by the Fedorans by the way.
>> >
>> > Pre-tablets, when small netbooks sales were exploding, Windows was
>> > dominant
>> > on PCs but ran poorly or not at all on netbooks and moreover there was
>> > an
>> > installation barrier for Windows on GNU/Linux netbooks. We were
>> > interested
>> > in reaching the 92% or so of teachers using Windows and widening Sugar
>> > availability on machines with pre-installed GNU/Linux (all 2% or so of
>> > them). Microsoft and Intel worked quickly to block GNU/Linux netbooks by
>> > pressuring OEMs to build faster machines, then tablets arrived and
>> > killed
>> > off netbooks.
>> >
>> > It's unfortunate that Sugar was not fully embraced by the GNU/Linux
>> > distros
>> > who missed a great opportunity in the education market where Microsoft
>> > had
>> > and has weaknesses, but that has been a symptom of free software
>> > projects
>> > struggling with strategic initiatives while concentrating on technical
>> > aspects.
>>
>> How does Sugar on Ubuntu (DXU) and Sugar on Tablets (DX experimental)
>> affect this equation for Sugar Labs?
>>
>> > Dismal marketing has contributed to dismal desktop market share
>> > (Microsoft's well-documented maneuvers played a role too of course).
>> >
>> > Installation: As Peter has mentioned, SoaS can be used for installation
>> > on a
>> > target PC, this is documented in the wiki.
>> >
>> > Concerning translations, language selection was available in at least
>> > several versions of SoaS, I remember switching French and US locale and
>> > keyboard demoing SoaS at an Educatec-Educatice convention in Paris. I
>> > have
>> > no doubt that solutions are possible, but do remember that Peter has
>> > been
>> > continuing SoaS work singlehandedly for some time now.
>> >
>> > Looking forward, I see a dual challenge for Sugar Labs: supporting the
>> > XO
>> > installed base (including hopefully keeping XO-4 availability alive),
>> > and
>> > transitioning to the wild new world of handheld devices.
>> >
>> > Sean
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Sebastian Silva
>> > 
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió:
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson 
>> >> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS!
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> That's right, at the time SoaS became an official Fedora spin, Mel and
>> >> Sebastian decided to take over marketing, which included coming up with
>> >> unmarketable names, linking with Fedora announcements, and opening a
>> >> Fedora
>> >> hosted minisite (the "home" of SoaS), none of which was done with any
>> >> consultation of the SL marketing team.
>> >>
>> >> Please try to include last names, you mean Sebastian Dzallas,

Re: [IAEP] Tech roadmap

[David Farning]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Daniel Narvaez  wrote:
> Re library versions, that reminds of a point I should have put in my list...
>
> I think now that the gobject introspection migration is over upstream can
> become more conservative about library versions. That should help both
> distributors and developers. We are already going in that direction really.
> If we add Webkit1 compatibility as discussed, I think 0.102 might have
> pretty much the same dependencies of 0.98. The only exception is libxkb if I
> remember correctly, for which introspection was really broken.

In addition to dependencies there can be issues with versions of dependencies.

Within the next couple of week we should see these fixes flow
upstream. So we can start talking about concrete issues and examples
rather than abstract notions. I think that will help clarify the
discussion.

AC's challenge was to quietly get a proof of concept in place which
adds value to deployments before suggesting making changes to
upstream. Now, AC has to clean up and abstract the proof of concept
work to prepare it for acceptance upstream.

> On Thursday, 7 November 2013, David Farning wrote:
>>
>> I agree :)
>>
>> Right now, we are sitting back and seeing what roll OLPC-Australia is
>> going to play in the ecosystem. The One Education distribution out of
>> Australia is a combination of Dextrose, Sugar .100 and some custom
>> patches. My semi-informed guess is that Walter and Rangan (
>> https://www.laptop.org.au/about ) are going to position One Education
>> as the successor to OLPC-OS. I hope that we will learn more at about
>> their plans at basecamp. ( http://olpcbasecamp.blogspot.com/ ) This
>> would take care or the leading edge on Fedora.
>>
>> On the Ubuntu side we have a bit of a challenge balancing bleeding
>> edge and stability. Sugar and Fedora tend to run a bit ahead of Debian
>> and Ubuntu in library versions. It take a significant amount of effort
>> to backport the necessary libraries to Ubuntu LTS. For this release we
>> agreed that the proper balance of innovation and stability was Sugar
>> .98 on Ubuntu 12.04. The next decision point will be which version of
>> Sugar to use for the 14.04 release due in the second quarter of 2014.
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Daniel Narvaez 
>> wrote:
>> > Cool stuff.
>> >
>> > As for Fedora it would be great to have builds with the latest sugar
>> > (stable
>> > and unstable) releases. I'm not saying to ship those to deployments of
>> > course, but they would help upstream development, marketing and
>> > testing...
>> > And they would help AC to make the transition to the next sugar release
>> > smoother.
>> >
>> > On 7 November 2013 02:05, David Farning 
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/
>> >> for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal
>> >> are jointly developing.
>> >>
>> >> For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing
>> >> is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should
>> >> work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu.
>> >>
>> >> It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers.
>> >> When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale
>> >> to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing.
>> >>
>> >> For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile
>> >> speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest
>> >> back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has
>> >> the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives.
>> >>
>> >> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez 
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones  wrote:
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >> > Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I
>> >> >> > don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB.
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box.  In Uruguay for
>> >> >> example.
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro?
>> >> >
>> >> > ___
>> >> > Sugar-devel mailing list
>> >> > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> >> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> David Farning
>> >> Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Daniel Narvaez
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Farning
>> Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel Narvaez
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
___
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting

[David Farning]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 3:07 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
> I'm sorry Sebastian, yes I should have been more clear about which Sebastian
> :-)
>
> At the time, Sugar was perceived as being only available on OLPC XOs, so our
> effort was designed to show that it was available for other platforms.
> Indeed, our claim has always been that it was hardware-agnostic (on Mac
> using virtualization), cf. our press releases (sl.o/press). And, SoaS as a
> marketing concept was meant to be distro-agnostic too (SuSE...), a position
> fought tooth and nail by the Fedorans by the way.
>
> Pre-tablets, when small netbooks sales were exploding, Windows was dominant
> on PCs but ran poorly or not at all on netbooks and moreover there was an
> installation barrier for Windows on GNU/Linux netbooks. We were interested
> in reaching the 92% or so of teachers using Windows and widening Sugar
> availability on machines with pre-installed GNU/Linux (all 2% or so of
> them). Microsoft and Intel worked quickly to block GNU/Linux netbooks by
> pressuring OEMs to build faster machines, then tablets arrived and killed
> off netbooks.
>
> It's unfortunate that Sugar was not fully embraced by the GNU/Linux distros
> who missed a great opportunity in the education market where Microsoft had
> and has weaknesses, but that has been a symptom of free software projects
> struggling with strategic initiatives while concentrating on technical
> aspects.

How does Sugar on Ubuntu (DXU) and Sugar on Tablets (DX experimental)
affect this equation for Sugar Labs?

> Dismal marketing has contributed to dismal desktop market share
> (Microsoft's well-documented maneuvers played a role too of course).
>
> Installation: As Peter has mentioned, SoaS can be used for installation on a
> target PC, this is documented in the wiki.
>
> Concerning translations, language selection was available in at least
> several versions of SoaS, I remember switching French and US locale and
> keyboard demoing SoaS at an Educatec-Educatice convention in Paris. I have
> no doubt that solutions are possible, but do remember that Peter has been
> continuing SoaS work singlehandedly for some time now.
>
> Looking forward, I see a dual challenge for Sugar Labs: supporting the XO
> installed base (including hopefully keeping XO-4 availability alive), and
> transitioning to the wild new world of handheld devices.
>
> Sean
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Sebastian Silva 
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió:
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS!
>>
>>
>> That's right, at the time SoaS became an official Fedora spin, Mel and
>> Sebastian decided to take over marketing, which included coming up with
>> unmarketable names, linking with Fedora announcements, and opening a Fedora
>> hosted minisite (the "home" of SoaS), none of which was done with any
>> consultation of the SL marketing team.
>>
>> Please try to include last names, you mean Sebastian Dzallas, original
>> developer of "Sugar On A Stick".
>>
>> Now that we're on the topic... the concept "Sugar On A Stick" has several
>> problems.
>>
>> 1.- It suggests it's the only possible Sugar OS on a USB.
>> 2.- It suggests it's not a serious OS to be installed on a computer.
>> 3.- It's impossible to translate.
>> 4.- It suggests it's not regular GNU/Linux, with availability of the
>> Myriad other GNU/Linux educational tools.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sebastian Silva
>> R+D SomosAzúcar
>> Sugar Labs Perú
>> @icarito
>>
>
>
> ___
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Tech roadmap

[David Farning]

I agree :)

Right now, we are sitting back and seeing what roll OLPC-Australia is
going to play in the ecosystem. The One Education distribution out of
Australia is a combination of Dextrose, Sugar .100 and some custom
patches. My semi-informed guess is that Walter and Rangan (
https://www.laptop.org.au/about ) are going to position One Education
as the successor to OLPC-OS. I hope that we will learn more at about
their plans at basecamp. ( http://olpcbasecamp.blogspot.com/ ) This
would take care or the leading edge on Fedora.

On the Ubuntu side we have a bit of a challenge balancing bleeding
edge and stability. Sugar and Fedora tend to run a bit ahead of Debian
and Ubuntu in library versions. It take a significant amount of effort
to backport the necessary libraries to Ubuntu LTS. For this release we
agreed that the proper balance of innovation and stability was Sugar
.98 on Ubuntu 12.04. The next decision point will be which version of
Sugar to use for the 14.04 release due in the second quarter of 2014.

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Daniel Narvaez  wrote:
> Cool stuff.
>
> As for Fedora it would be great to have builds with the latest sugar (stable
> and unstable) releases. I'm not saying to ship those to deployments of
> course, but they would help upstream development, marketing and testing...
> And they would help AC to make the transition to the next sugar release
> smoother.
>
> On 7 November 2013 02:05, David Farning 
> wrote:
>>
>> Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/
>> for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal
>> are jointly developing.
>>
>> For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing
>> is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should
>> work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu.
>>
>> It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers.
>> When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale
>> to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing.
>>
>> For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile
>> speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest
>> back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has
>> the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives.
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez 
>> wrote:
>> > On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones  wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> > Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I
>> >> > don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB.
>> >>
>> >> Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box.  In Uruguay for
>> >> example.
>> >
>> >
>> > You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro?
>> >
>> > ___
>> > Sugar-devel mailing list
>> > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Farning
>> Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
>
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel Narvaez



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Tech roadmap

[David Farning]

Please see the link at the bottom left of http://dextrose.ac/platform/
for the Sugar on Ubuntu images which Activity Central and Plan Ceibal
are jointly developing.

For stability it is based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Sugar .98. The testing
is done on classmate to meet Plan Ceibal's specifications. I should
work equally well on any machine that boots Ubuntu.

It is currently is small scale testing by a couple hundred teachers.
When the image meets Ceibal's quality standards the pilot will scale
to approximately 10,000 units for wider testing.

For more information, I have CC Anish Mangal, the project owner (agile
speak) and Ruben Rodriguez the lead developer. Ruben has the strongest
back ground on the technical issues involved in the port. Anish has
the deepest understanding of timelines and objectives.

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Narvaez  wrote:
> On 6 November 2013 16:20, Manuel Quiñones  wrote:
>>
>>
>> > Classmates are basically just x86 netbooks, I've not tried it as I
>> > don't have HW but I don't see any reason they shouldn't work OOTB.
>>
>> Yep. Sugar is running in classmates out of the box.  In Uruguay for
>> example.
>
>
> You mean people are using them in Uruguay deployments? Which distro?
>
> ___
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2013-09-16

[David Farning]

hands helping with both
> closing a few outstanding tickets [9] and helping with testing.
> Gonzalo and Jerry have been preparing images (Fedora 18) for OLPC AU
> that can be used for testing [10]. Kudos to our release manager Daniel
> Narveaz!!!
>
> 7. Tom Gilliard has been making SoaS images on Fedora 20 that can also
> be used for testing [11]. Meanwhile, the previous release of Sugar
> (98.8) is available on Ubuntu (12.04) [12] thanks to the efforts of
> Quidam.
>
> === Sugar Labs ===
>
> 8. Please visit (and contribute to) our planet [13].
>
> 
>
> [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/no-child-left-untableted.html
> [2] 
> http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/09/15/magazine/15klein3/15klein3-sfSpan.jpg
> [3] http://developer.sugarlabs.org/web-architecture.md.html
> [4] http://developer.sugarlabs.org/android.md.html
> [5] http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Ingles_10-08-2013.pdf (en)
> [6] http://people.sugarlabs.org/walter/Guia_Esp_12-08-2013.pdf (es)
> [7] http://ceibaljam.org/drupal/?q=edujam2013
> [8] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2013
> [9] 
> http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=accepted&status=reopened&priority=Immediate&priority=Urgent&component=Sugar&status_field=New&order=priority
> [10] http://build.laptop.org.au/xo/os/sugar-100
> [11] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Fedora_20#SoaS_86_64-dm_.28remix.29
> [12] 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Ubuntu#Ubuntu_12.04.2_LTS_-_Dextrose_Sugar_Live
> [13] http://planet.sugarlab.org
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
> ___
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
___
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Re: [IAEP] Sugar on Android via HTML5

[David Farning]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 7:51 AM, David Farning
 wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:54 PM, John Watlington  wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 5:04 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Caryl Bigenho  wrote:
>>>
>>> One of the things that makes Sugar the ideal learning platform for
>>> children (and youth) is the wonderful compatibility of so many of the
>>> Activities ... both from Activity to Activity and from student to student.
>>> This facilitates the sort of learning we are all hoping to see more of...
>>> creative problem solving, project based learning and cooperative learning.
>>> Without this ability to integrate parts of projects, it would just be
>>> another collection of apps.
>>>
>>
>> I did not want to muddy the picture by injecting my own viewpoint, but now
>> that I've heard from others (on and off list) it is clear that the split is
>> driven by the role they play in the ecosystem.
>> Most technologists have come up with reasons why they don't think a complete
>> Sugar experience would work on Android. Therefore, activities must run like
>> any other app on Android. On the other hand, as Caryl said, "Without this
>> ability to integrate...it would just be a collection of apps".
>>
>> Somewhat knowing the limitations of what can be done with Sugar stuff on
>> Android, but disregarding that for a minute, I would say that Sugar as a
>> *platform* is an experience. It has a UI. It has a UX. Everything from the
>> Zoom interface to the activities to the Journal is Sugar. We have taken the
>> original "Sugar on the OLPC XO" experience and replicated that to the
>> classmate PC, SoaS, and other spins and distros, but in none of these cases
>> did we break the holistic Sugar experience. Now, along comes a popular OS,
>> and because the tech parts don't fit, we are advocating breaking up the
>> pieces and taking whatever flies. Memorize will become one of the few
>> hundred thousand apps on Android.
>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>> It's like saying we'll do the cat sprite from Scratch, but nothing else.
>> It's like saying we'll do the birds and pigs from Angry Birds, but not the
>> slingshot. Sugar, without all its pieces isn't worth the trouble.
>>
>>
>> Sameer,
>>I disagree somewhat with your thesis (and am very glad you started this
>> discussion.)
>>
>> From a technological standpoint, it is actually probably easier to implement
>> what you describe:
>> Sugar as a monolithic Android application, which takes over the entire user
>> interface when
>> launched.   The reason I never considered it seriously was the larger
>> ecosystem.
>>
>> The reason to move to Android from Linux is two-fold:
>> - Chip vendors are dropping Linux support in favor of Android.   The cheap
>> chinese ARM
>>  vendors only support Android.
>> - Android/iOS are where application development is happening.  There is a
>> much larger
>> community of Android developers than Linux or Sugar developers.
>>
>> The hope was to provide the infrastructure underlying Sugar (the Journal
>> datastore and
>> collaboration) as Android services, encouraging their use in new Android
>> applications.
>> In this model, the Journal is another Android application, accessing the
>> Journal datastore service.
>> New Sugar activities written in HTML should be capable of running in Sugar
>> on Linux
>> or as Android activities (although perhaps with different execution
>> wrappers).
>> In this manner, perhaps we can enlarge the Sugar community with developers
>> mainly
>> targeting Android.
>
> Just to clarify:
> 1. OLPC-A's intention is to create a HTML5+JS  framework for creating
> Sugar Activities.
> 2. Sugar Activities created using this framework will run equally well
> on both 'Sugar for linux' and Android.
> 3. This requires two separate abstraction layers "wrapper" one for
> Sugar on linux and one for Android.
> 4. These abstraction layers make Sugar Services such as collaboration
> and the journal available within the HTML5+JS framework.
>
> Is there an implementation plan and roadmap available? Are there
> sufficient resources committed to these projects to see them through
> to completion?

I just wanted to follow up this thread. I find it interesting because
the answer depend a bit on the person asking the questions. Is the
person asking the questions:
1. An OLPC hater who is going to hate.
2. A muggle who is not capable of understanding 

Re: [IAEP] Sugar on Android via HTML5

[David Farning]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Manuel Quiñones  wrote:
> 2013/9/13 David Farning :
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:54 PM, John Watlington  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sep 10, 2013, at 5:04 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Caryl Bigenho  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> One of the things that makes Sugar the ideal learning platform for
>>>> children (and youth) is the wonderful compatibility of so many of the
>>>> Activities ... both from Activity to Activity and from student to student.
>>>> This facilitates the sort of learning we are all hoping to see more of...
>>>> creative problem solving, project based learning and cooperative learning.
>>>> Without this ability to integrate parts of projects, it would just be
>>>> another collection of apps.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I did not want to muddy the picture by injecting my own viewpoint, but now
>>> that I've heard from others (on and off list) it is clear that the split is
>>> driven by the role they play in the ecosystem.
>>> Most technologists have come up with reasons why they don't think a complete
>>> Sugar experience would work on Android. Therefore, activities must run like
>>> any other app on Android. On the other hand, as Caryl said, "Without this
>>> ability to integrate...it would just be a collection of apps".
>>>
>>> Somewhat knowing the limitations of what can be done with Sugar stuff on
>>> Android, but disregarding that for a minute, I would say that Sugar as a
>>> *platform* is an experience. It has a UI. It has a UX. Everything from the
>>> Zoom interface to the activities to the Journal is Sugar. We have taken the
>>> original "Sugar on the OLPC XO" experience and replicated that to the
>>> classmate PC, SoaS, and other spins and distros, but in none of these cases
>>> did we break the holistic Sugar experience. Now, along comes a popular OS,
>>> and because the tech parts don't fit, we are advocating breaking up the
>>> pieces and taking whatever flies. Memorize will become one of the few
>>> hundred thousand apps on Android.
>>>
>>> I disagree.
>>>
>>> It's like saying we'll do the cat sprite from Scratch, but nothing else.
>>> It's like saying we'll do the birds and pigs from Angry Birds, but not the
>>> slingshot. Sugar, without all its pieces isn't worth the trouble.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sameer,
>>>I disagree somewhat with your thesis (and am very glad you started this
>>> discussion.)
>>>
>>> From a technological standpoint, it is actually probably easier to implement
>>> what you describe:
>>> Sugar as a monolithic Android application, which takes over the entire user
>>> interface when
>>> launched.   The reason I never considered it seriously was the larger
>>> ecosystem.
>>>
>>> The reason to move to Android from Linux is two-fold:
>>> - Chip vendors are dropping Linux support in favor of Android.   The cheap
>>> chinese ARM
>>>  vendors only support Android.
>>> - Android/iOS are where application development is happening.  There is a
>>> much larger
>>> community of Android developers than Linux or Sugar developers.
>>>
>>> The hope was to provide the infrastructure underlying Sugar (the Journal
>>> datastore and
>>> collaboration) as Android services, encouraging their use in new Android
>>> applications.
>>> In this model, the Journal is another Android application, accessing the
>>> Journal datastore service.
>>> New Sugar activities written in HTML should be capable of running in Sugar
>>> on Linux
>>> or as Android activities (although perhaps with different execution
>>> wrappers).
>>> In this manner, perhaps we can enlarge the Sugar community with developers
>>> mainly
>>> targeting Android.
>>
>> Just to clarify:
>> 1. OLPC-A's intention is to create a HTML5+JS  framework for creating
>> Sugar Activities.
>
> A small correction: activities using web technologies has been
> discussed for a while in the Sugar community, and is now being
> actively implemented as part of Sugar roadmap.

Yes, This is also figures prominently in my risk analysis. It appears
that three Sugar developers are paid by OLPC: Manq, Gonzalo, and
Walter. Please correct me if I am wrong or this has changed. Is OLPC-A
in a position to commit these resources until the project is
compl

Re: [IAEP] Sugar on Android via HTML5

[David Farning]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:54 PM, John Watlington  wrote:
>
> On Sep 10, 2013, at 5:04 PM, Sameer Verma wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Caryl Bigenho  wrote:
>>
>> One of the things that makes Sugar the ideal learning platform for
>> children (and youth) is the wonderful compatibility of so many of the
>> Activities ... both from Activity to Activity and from student to student.
>> This facilitates the sort of learning we are all hoping to see more of...
>> creative problem solving, project based learning and cooperative learning.
>> Without this ability to integrate parts of projects, it would just be
>> another collection of apps.
>>
>
> I did not want to muddy the picture by injecting my own viewpoint, but now
> that I've heard from others (on and off list) it is clear that the split is
> driven by the role they play in the ecosystem.
> Most technologists have come up with reasons why they don't think a complete
> Sugar experience would work on Android. Therefore, activities must run like
> any other app on Android. On the other hand, as Caryl said, "Without this
> ability to integrate...it would just be a collection of apps".
>
> Somewhat knowing the limitations of what can be done with Sugar stuff on
> Android, but disregarding that for a minute, I would say that Sugar as a
> *platform* is an experience. It has a UI. It has a UX. Everything from the
> Zoom interface to the activities to the Journal is Sugar. We have taken the
> original "Sugar on the OLPC XO" experience and replicated that to the
> classmate PC, SoaS, and other spins and distros, but in none of these cases
> did we break the holistic Sugar experience. Now, along comes a popular OS,
> and because the tech parts don't fit, we are advocating breaking up the
> pieces and taking whatever flies. Memorize will become one of the few
> hundred thousand apps on Android.
>
> I disagree.
>
> It's like saying we'll do the cat sprite from Scratch, but nothing else.
> It's like saying we'll do the birds and pigs from Angry Birds, but not the
> slingshot. Sugar, without all its pieces isn't worth the trouble.
>
>
> Sameer,
>I disagree somewhat with your thesis (and am very glad you started this
> discussion.)
>
> From a technological standpoint, it is actually probably easier to implement
> what you describe:
> Sugar as a monolithic Android application, which takes over the entire user
> interface when
> launched.   The reason I never considered it seriously was the larger
> ecosystem.
>
> The reason to move to Android from Linux is two-fold:
> - Chip vendors are dropping Linux support in favor of Android.   The cheap
> chinese ARM
>  vendors only support Android.
> - Android/iOS are where application development is happening.  There is a
> much larger
> community of Android developers than Linux or Sugar developers.
>
> The hope was to provide the infrastructure underlying Sugar (the Journal
> datastore and
> collaboration) as Android services, encouraging their use in new Android
> applications.
> In this model, the Journal is another Android application, accessing the
> Journal datastore service.
> New Sugar activities written in HTML should be capable of running in Sugar
> on Linux
> or as Android activities (although perhaps with different execution
> wrappers).
> In this manner, perhaps we can enlarge the Sugar community with developers
> mainly
> targeting Android.

Just to clarify:
1. OLPC-A's intention is to create a HTML5+JS  framework for creating
Sugar Activities.
2. Sugar Activities created using this framework will run equally well
on both 'Sugar for linux' and Android.
3. This requires two separate abstraction layers "wrapper" one for
Sugar on linux and one for Android.
4. These abstraction layers make Sugar Services such as collaboration
and the journal available within the HTML5+JS framework.

Is there an implementation plan and roadmap available? Are there
sufficient resources committed to these projects to see them through
to completion?

> If we pursue Sugar as a single Android application,
> with embedded
> Python activities, we are isolating ourselves from the Android community.
>
> The danger of this approach is the loss of an integrated UX.  This could be
> addressed
> by customizing the home UI, in the same manner that the XO tablet has a
> custom home UI
> implementing the Dreams interface, but that would require "rooting" the
> tablet in some manner.
> But the native Android UI isn't that bad...
>
> Cheers,
> wad
>
>
> ___
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> de...@lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
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Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] ANNOUNCEMENT XSCE 0.3 Final Release

[David Farning]

T.K.,

Can you ping me off list with your specific needs. I'll try to make sure
your needs are meet in the next couple of releases.

I have tried pinging you off list... but get get bounce notices


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:05 PM,  wrote:

> Good news indeed and my appreciation to all the hard work the XSCE team
> have put into.
>
> I recently installed R2 on SD a card for XO 1.75 (512 Mib) with 3 APs. It
> seems to be working fine with 30 XO-1s connected via different AP.
> Registration went well, ejabberdctl displayed registered users, moodle
> work, backup work. So I am a happy end-user waiting to see it deployed in
> the wild soon!
>
> T.K. Kang
>
>
>
> >-Original Message-
> >From: George Hunt [mailto:georgejh...@gmail.com]
> >Sent: Friday, June 7, 2013 08:07 AM
> >To: 'Community Support Volunteers -- who help respond to help AT
> laptop.org'
> >Cc: 'Support Gangsters', 'server-devel', 'Testing', 'IAEP SugarLabs',
> de...@laptop.org
> >Subject: [support-gang] ANNOUNCEMENT XSCE 0.3 Final Release
> >
> >After three months of hard work and three weeks of working out the
> >kinks in the release process, XSCE 0.3 is ready for its final release.
> >
> >We went conservative this release. Emphasis on stability meant less time
> >for new features.
> >
> >
> >* XSCE now runs on the XO-1.5,XO-1.75 and  XO-4.
> >
> >* Modular Architecture: cleanly integrate extendable services.
> >
> >* XSCE runs on the XOs' current OS 13.1.0 (we discovered some wrinkles
> with
> >13.2.0 which push its use off to the next release)
> >
> >* Moodle is Back!
> >
> >* Content filtering via openDNS.com
> >
> >* Script for formatting of SD cards, and integration into system for
> >content storage and memory extending swap file (does not work on XO4's)
> >
> >
> >
> >Grab an XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or a XO-4 to give XSCE 0.3 give a whirl:
> >
> >http://schoolserver.org/0.3
> >
> >If you are just getting started with XSCE we suggest using the instruction
> >at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3/Installingto
> >install your first server.
> >
> >Once you are through the install, a good second step is to work your new
> >server though it’s paces by doing the smoke test at
> >http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3/Testing
> >
> >
> >Monster thanks to everyone who spent months of springtime work --
> traveling
> >days from quite different parts of North America to make this community
> >product real.
> >
> >George Hunt
> >
> >___
> >support-gang mailing list
> >support-g...@lists.laptop.org
> >http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang
> >
>
>
> ___
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>



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[IAEP] XSCE 0.3 RC2 Release Announcement

[David Farning]

After three months of hard work and three weeks of working out the
kinks in the release process XSCE 0.3 RC2 is ready to go.

We went conservative this release. Emphasis on stability meant less time
for new features. A big thank you to anyone who can help increase this
stability out by testing RC2 in preparation for next weeks XSCE 0.3 release:

--Tested

* XSCE now runs on the XO-1.5,XO-1.75 and  XO-4.

* Modular Architecture: cleanly integrate extendable services.

* XSCE runs on XOs' brand new OLPC OS 13.1.0.

* Moodle is Back!

* Content filtering via openDNS.com

* Script for formatting of SD cards, and integration into
system<http://dansguardian.org/>

-- Experimental

* ix86 & x64 testing is beginning in earnest.

* Highly experimental XO-1 functionality now demonstrated, tho NOT advised!

* Auto-recognition and mounting of USB hard drives. Works but not quit well
enough to handle the hard drive being jostled enough to cause brief
disconnects.

* Full offline installs possible going forward.

  <http://dansguardian.org/>

Grab an XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or a XO-4 to give XSCE 0.3 RC2 give a whirl:

http://schoolserver.org/0.3

If you are just getting started with XSCE we suggest using the instruction
at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3/Installingto
install your first server.

Once you are through the install, a good second step is to work your new
server though it’s paces by doing the smoke test at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3/Testing

For the truly ambitious, try putting your server hardware of choice through
the tests at and update the results table at

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3/Testing/Results.

Til then, these little guys rock (TM, iLoveMyXO.com !)  Monster thanks to
the folks whose

months of springtime work went into this imminent accomplishment--
traveling days from quite different parts of North America to make this
community product real.


-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
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[IAEP] Promoting Pablo Flores to CEO of Activity Central

[David Farning]

I am proud to announce that we are promoting Pablo Flores as the new
CEO of Activity Central.

Pablo has a strong background in all things OLPC and Sugar from his
time at Plan Ceibal, leadership in Ceibal Jam, and most recently
as community architect for Activity Central.

Pablo and the rest of the Activity Central team will continue the core
AC mission of providing service and support for deployments.

I will continue my work in the Sugar/OLPC ecosystem by focusing on the
junction point between deployment technical teams and education teams.
My research so far has lead me to the notion of learning objects.
While poorly defined in the education literature, the vocabulary around
learning objects seems to lends itself to the intersection of technical
personal and education personal in early childhood education.

david
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[IAEP] Communication from teacher - livescribe.

[David Farning]

As I mentioned earlier I am working on technology which I can
personally use to keep my nieces and nephews though early elementary
school.

Attached is a link to a live scribe video which one of their teachers
created to help parents understand the techniques the school to teach
two digit addition.

I thought it matched nicely with the idea that the XO can be used to
enhance communication between teachers and parents.

http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=VSV4n7ZzgKgp

david
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[IAEP] Board Intentions

[David Farning]

The other day Sascha asked the question, "What do Oversight Board
candidates intend to _do_ during their terms?"

Here in the United states, a new school years is getting underway.
This means afternoons and evenings filled with helping nieces and
nephews with their reading, school work, and piano lessons. While they
learn, I learn about learning. It troubles me that I don't use Sugar
of XO as part of my tutoring. The question I ask my self is, "How can
I recommend Sugar if I don't use it myself?"

The challenges I face are:
1. Aligning with an existing class curriculum.
2. Limited time with each child.
3. Limited preparation time.
4. Limited formal training in curriculum development.
and those who know me will probably add
5. Limited patience :(

Instead of using Sugar, I look though my collection of text books and
a list of websites for resources which augment the days learning
objectives. This is not a criticism of Sugar itself. Just an
observation that while I now fall into a target category of Sugar
users, yet I don't use Sugar. Now that Activity Central is taking
shape, I am going to shift my focus to scratching my own itch as a
uncle and tutor.

My intention for the next couple of years is to create a set of
activities and lessons which fill my needs while addressing my
limitations. As I mature in my understanding of teaching, I will hire
teachers, designers, and developers to replace me in creating these
activities and lessons:) Hopefully deployments and parents will find
the activities and lessons useful enough to use and support.

With regard to the Sugar ecosystem, my goal will be to raise the voice
of content creators and inexperienced teachers.

david
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[IAEP] Sugar Labs Oversight Board - Candidacy

[David Farning]

I, David Farning, would like to announce my candidacy for a position
on the Sugar Labs Oversight Board.

As a member on the original Sugar Labs Oversight Board, I came to feel
that as much as I believed in the vision of OLPC and Sugar Labs there
were a number of needs in the ecosystem which could be met by a third
organization.
1. The voice and needs of deployments were being over shadowed by the
global voice of Sugar Labs and OLPC.
2. There was no organization provide service and support for
deployments. As a result, deployments required a significant amount of
technical sophistication before they could get started.
3. Because of the volunteer nature of Sugar Labs, developers tended to
work on the interesting and innovative problems rather than the daily
grind necessary to deliver a fully polished educational platform.

For the past two years I, and a number of other developers, have been
establishing Activity Central [1] to help fill the above needs. Our
model is to provide technical service and support to deployments. This
effort has resulted in the Dextrose [2] operation system which we
custom develop and support for several large and small deployment.
Because we depend on customer revenue for our sustainability we have a
strong incentive to meet the software needs of deployments.

Because Dextrose is based on Upstream Sugar and OLPC OS releases
Activity Central has a strong incentive to assist in the continued
success of Sugar Labs and OLPC. To this end we have made a number of
commitments:
1. All code written by Activity Central developers will be released
with an open source license.
2. Activity Central developers spend 60% of their time on revenue
generating work. They are free to spend the remaining 40% of their
time on projects which are of general value to the ecosystem.
3. Activity Central supports a Community Architect whose job is
identify and support local and global communities that are valuable
parts of the Sugar Labs and OLPC ecosystem.

>From time to time I am asked why I chose to form a third organization
rather than work within Sugar Labs or OLPC. A third global
organization brings several advantages to the ecosystem:
1. It promotes cooperative decision making.  When the ecosystem
consisted of two primary participants, Sugar Labs and OLP, there was a
tendency for competitive decision making. When a third player was
added to the mix, the value of cooperative decision making become more
apparent.
2. Organizations with a business focus often provide value to a Free
Software ecosystem. Interestingly OLPC-A has seen this and has been
shifting toward a 'social entrepreneurship' model.
3. Activity Central approaches the ecosystem from a different
viewpoint than either sugar Labs or OLPC. As global innovators both
Sugar Labs' and OLPC's strengths are top down. Ideas and
Implementations flow down from the central organization to deployments
and users. As a service provider, most of Activity Central's ideas and
implementation flow up from deployments and user. Our work flow is to
solve issues faced by individual deployments which we generalize and
push upstream.

thank you,
David Farning

1. http://activitycentral.com/
2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose
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Re: [IAEP] team updates

[David Farning]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:20 AM, Walter Bender  wrote:
> At the last Sugar Labs oversight board meeting [1], we discussed the
> need to update the status of the various teams and local labs. You are
> receiving this email because you are currently listed as a team
> coordinator on the wiki [2]. We would like each of you to make a short
> report on your team by email to the iaep list by 9 September  and plan
> to attend the next scheduled SLOBs meeting, 16 September. Below [3] is
> an outline prepared by John Tierney that may serve to guide you in
> preparing your report.
>
> I am aware that some of you are no longer active in your roles. In
> those cases, could you please send me some names of possible
> replacements as team coordinators. Also, in some cases, the teams
> themselves are perhaps obsolete. This will be one of the discussion
> topics on the 16th.

> Documentation
>     David Farning


> What does the team see as its constraints from being more successful
> in its Mission? What are you doing to try to resolve the constraint?
> What can Sugar Labs 'central' or the community do to help?

Documentation is a hard problem for community projects.

One solution is to focus on the documentation individual deployments
create and help make those documents more widely available.

I don't have any suggestions for continuing the team or identifying a
new coordinator.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Dextrose] [Sugar-devel] About Activity Central and Dextrose (was: [ANNOUNCE] New Dextrose-3 development build: Alpha-1 (dx3ng36))

[David Farning]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 6:47 AM, Gonzalo Odiard  wrote:
> Thanks
>
> Gonzalo
>
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Sascha Silbe 
> wrote:
>>
>> Excerpts from Gonzalo Odiard's message of Thu Sep 01 21:24:31 +0200 2011:
>>
>> > There are a public list of patches?
>>
>> Not just a list, the patches themselves are public [1].
>>
>> Sascha
>>
>> [1] https://people.sugarlabs.org/~silbe/dextrose/patchsets/
>> --
>> http://sascha.silbe.org/
>> http://www.infra-silbe.de/

One of our goals for DX4 will be to streamline the patch maintenance
process. That is something to look at for Q1 2012.

david
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[IAEP] EduJAM day 2.

[David Farning]

Another day of EduJAM is over. The Event coordinators from Ceibal Jam set an
impressively high bar for future conferences.

The morning centered around Status and Plans reports from deployments. Plan
Ceibal started the day with a session on the technical status and efficacy of
the project. Representatives of Nepal, Rwanda, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and
Argentina participated in a panel discussion about the status and plans for
their deployments.

The reports were mainly from people implementing technical aspects of the
project rather than official spokes people. As such, they were remarkably open
and constructive.

The third session was about Sugar on non-XO hardware. It is an open question
which several deployments are studying.

The afternoon was an unconference. There were three tracks in which speakers
gave a series of 30 minute talks.

The format worked well. Other Sugar and OLPC events have gotten a bit unruly as
people's passions overflowed.  This event had a lot of listening and learning
followed by conversations over dinner.  The unconference session gave a chance
for many people to give uninterrupted 30 minute talks of personal interest.
Participants were able to 'vote with their feet' about what they personally
found valuable.

Tomorrow kicks off the first day of the code sprint. Wish us luck.

Thanks to everyone that participated. I made a (significant to me) investment in
this event.  The Return on Investment for the community and Activity Central was
quite a bit above what I expected!

david

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[IAEP] EduJAM day 1.

[David Farning]

We finished EduJam day 1. There were two track which I will call technical and
boundary. The technical track included a series of talk about developing and
maintaining Sugar followed by a talk on advanced Etoys by Bert Freudenberg. If
you get a chance, please attend a future EduJam just to meet Bert. In email, all
we see is his German efficiency. In person he is one of the nicest and most
thoughtful people I have ever met!

The other track was the boundary track. It explored the boundaries of the tech
side project. The morning was social boundaries as the panels explored tools for
engaging a broader community, how to effectively build a community, and how to
engage in conversation between technical people and educators.

The afternoon was an exploration of the boundaries of the technology. The talks
and panels were exploring the questions, "Where will sugar go and where will the
XO go?"

As is often the case the hallway track is the unsung hero conferences. It was
great to see Pablo and Christoph with their heads together discussing the role
and importance and moderation in this type of event.

Another small cluster included Martin Langhoff, Bernie, and Tch discussing patch
flow. Bernie was waving his hands wildly. Langhoff was adjusting his glasses
with great intensity. Tch was quietly listening with his (frequently used)
expression of, "Ok, now how in the heck am I supposed to make this work." :)

Carlos Rabassa triggered my "Ahh Ha" moment in the hallway. He made a comment
about the sales principle that is it more effective to keep you current
customers happy than it is to reach new customers.

While "customer" might not be the correct term. The general principle of
focusing on making the most of current relationships with developers, educators
and deployments before trying to establish new relationships seems to apply
rather well.

Over the past week we have met many people who have the potential to become key
contributors to the ecosystem and tomorrow's community leaders.

Now we have to identify, engage, enable, and empower them.   

david

-- ten key ideas of customer satisfaction.
1. Do you realize the value of your current customers? These are your best
accounts. They are quicker to buy and require fewer "special deals." Never take
your customers for granted!
2. Do you communicate to all your customers that they are important?
3. Do you encourage customers to return to your business?
4. Do you tailor your services to your customers' particular needs?
5. Do your customers call you when they have a tough problem?
6. Do you provide unique services that your customers would find difficult to
duplicate somewhere else?
7. Do your customers feel that you are concerned about their interests and
welfare?
8. Do you attempt to learn as much about each customer as possible?
9. Do you follow up to make sure orders are filled quickly and accurately?
10. Do you follow up on complaints to make sure the resolution was satisfactory
to the customer?

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[IAEP] EduJAM day 3 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

The theme for day was using the XO to help kids learn. Because this is not
my area of expertise I will defer summarizing the day and take a moment to
explain the rational for a technical focused summit for an education
project.

There are two aspect to the OLPC ecosystem, technological and educational.
Technologically we face three general classes of problems: hardware,
software, and connectivity. When these three aspects of the project work,
teachers and students have an outstanding tool. When one or more of these
aspects is not working teachers and students have a suboptimal tool.

Once the tool is created and understood, educators can train teachers to
take advantage of the tool, create content which builds on the affordances
of the tool, and create curriculum which enable teachers to build on their
understanding and available content to create lessons which align with the
needs of their class, school, and country.

The vision for EduJAM Montevideo 2011 is to bring people working on the
technical aspects together to learn from each other and understand the needs
of educators though a series of presentations and conversations.  The goal
of this process is:
1. Better understand educators needs.
2. Learn how we as developers and engineers can make a product which is more
effective for educators. 3. Learn and communicate with our fellow developers
and engineers to learn to work more effectively.

Ideally, another organization will sponsor a complementary event which
focuses on how educators can leverage the tool to enhance learning. These
complementary events can form the nucleus for a dialog which drive the
project forward.
 
david

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

> -Original Message-
> From: qu...@us.netrek.org [mailto:qu...@us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of
> James Cameron
> Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2011 4:47 AM
> To: David Farning
> Cc: 'IAEP'; 'Sugar Devel'
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay
> 
> On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 04:24:53PM -0300, David Farning wrote:
> > >From a tech point of view, the big question have been:
> > 4. questions about why touch pad behavior has changed in the latest
> > release with out giving teachers a heads up.
> 
> I don't know what release they are using, or were using.
> 
> I don't know if they mean XO-1.5 or XO-1.
> 
> XO-1.5 touchpad behaviour was changed; tap to click was disabled or
> enabled.  Default varied by release, and the default should be
configurable.
> 
> XO-1 touchpad behaviour was changed.  Latest OLPC release on XO-1 is
> 10.1.3, which has no touchpad change compared to 10.1.2, so I presume
> they were on 8.2.1 or a derivative previously?
> 
> Two XO-1 changes may be relevant:
> 
> 1.  the enabling of automatic power management from 8.2.1 to 10.1.3, which
> causes touchpad to be momentarily unresponsive when the laptop is
> suspended; this is in the release notes [1], so OLPC did include a heads
up,
> 
> 2.  the revised kernel driver for XO-1 touchpad [2], which changes the
> behaviour somewhat; this is not in the release notes.  It went in with
10.1.1.
> 
> Please encourage them to be involved in testing of development builds, so
> that they can provide feedback early.

+1. And we should also consider this is a custom spin for UY.  So effective
QA will involve:
1. Sugar.
2. OLPC.
3. AC -- if they chose.
4. In country development staff.
5. Users.

>From what I can see, the idea that the benefits of working together is
starting to outweigh the costs for many of the participants and
organizations :)

david

> [1]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3#XO-
> 1_Automatic_power_management_issues
> 
> [2]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Touchpad_driver_changes
> 
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/

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[IAEP] EduJAM day 2.5 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

The afternoon and evening sessions of the tour were a great complement to
the morning session.  Yes, you heard correctly, afternoon _and_ evening
sessions:) Pablo has us hopping. Tomorrow morning starts a 600am.

The afternoon session was again at public school 286. Rather than observe
and interact with the kids in the class room, the teachers asked us to take
a step back and look at the larger picture of how the laptop project affect
the school and how the school affects the project. One interesting note was
the emphasis they had that the laptops were educational tools. They were
part of a larger tool box consisting of textbooks and other activities.

While kids usually receive their laptop at 6, when they start school, it is
common for kids to begin using and becoming familiar with the laptop and
sugar when they are 4 years old. By the time kids enter high school they
have had several years of experience. This presents a challenge for teachers
as they try to catch up and keep up with the kids :)

The primary technical requests were that social-calc works and that there is
timeline activity.

In terms of education theory, it was interesting to listen to a discussion
the evolved from the timeline request.  Several teachers commented that the
timeline was a very valuable tool because it would give the students a place
to consolidate the information they had learned over several week.  Maybe it
was my poor Spanish. But the conversation seemed to reflect concepts very
similar to portfolios and the act of refection the journal affords.

The evening session was with Flordeceibo. (http://www.flordeceibo.edu.uy/ )
We started the evening off with a video providing an overview of project. It
is just over 2.5G so I hope that someone with some bandwidth uploads it and
links to it in a blog post.

Sadly, the university and Flordeceibo are not directly involved in teacher
training.  Teacher education happens in a parallel system similar to normal
schools.

The real meat of the session (for software developers) happened after the
break during a feedback session. Several of the Flordeceibo members had
lists of bugs they have encountered during the last few years. At that point
the passion became palpable.

Because of the sheer amount of feedback we invited everyone to share
'headlines' of their concerns at this session. Then, follow up Sunday
morning at the first day of the hack feast.

Over the last couple of months one on the most important lessons we have
learn while working with ParaguayEduca is the importance of one on one and
face to face sessions between developers and educators. The normal tools
that open source developers use for feedback are too 'unfamiliar' to most
teachers.

Instead the feedback, at least initially, requires a personal relationship
which builds trust and helps the developer and educator learn how to
effectively communicate. As a result, we invited everyone to join the sugar
camp on Sunday morning.  I would like to encourage all developers to spend
time talking one on one with the Flordeceibo members to turn their feedback
into a format which is can be submitted as bug reports.

david

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[IAEP] EduJAM day 2 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

This morning we are in a classroom observing (and after a few minutes
participating) in a class room session involving turtle art.

The first task was to draw a rectangle with two side being 3 cm long and the
other two side being less then 3 cm. This involved using as ruler to
determine how many turtle steps in a centimeter. 

Step 2 was doing this with the repeat block.

Step 3 was  attaching a right triangle which shared a side with the
rectangle.

At this school, I am not sure how wide spread the practice is, the teachers
work from a daily curriculum. It is up to them to build us of the XO into
the lesson plan.

Once per week a plan Ceibal teacher trainer come to the school to help the
teacher create learning task which align with the upcoming curriculum. Using
this system of training the trainer appears to be a cost effective method of
scaling expertise.

>From a tech point of view, the big question have been:
1. Running sugar on non-xo hardware.
2. The journal is a bit confusing.
3. Print is a must.
4. questions about why touch pad behavior has changed in the latest release
with out giving teachers a heads up.

david

 

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Olidata computers in Uruguay

[David Farning]

> -Original Message-
> From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel-
> boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Gary Martin
> Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 2:13 PM
> To: Yamandu Ploskonka
> Cc: IAEP SugarLabs; Sugar-dev Devel
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Olidata computers in Uruguay
> 
> On 2 May 2011, at 16:47, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
> 
> > the Sur list is following this thread in detail, I just wanted to share
a FYI for
> developers.
> >
> > 30,000 Olidata laptops have been purchased by Ceibal at $130 apiece and
> teachers are being "upgraded" to those, trading in their XOs.
> 
> Thanks for raising this issue! I've cc:ed the sugar-devel list as it's the
first I've
> read of this.

+1 We had the opportunity to work with one of these machines this morning.
It looks like we should start looking into supporting this piece of
hardware.

After looking at this for the past couple of weeks, I looks like installing
the Fedora based SoaS appears to be the path of least resistance.

The unit we saw this morning seems to be the most recent stock SoaS + 80% of
the dextrose patches + a patch set developed by Uruguay. 

David

> > One of the most noticeable source for incompatibilities seems to be
> > screen definition, 800x600 in the Olidata, and thus several Activities
> > are cropped,
> 
> Ouch, quite a few Activity toolbars will likely overflow at 800x600
(overflow
> widgets land in a drop down menu in the far right of the toolbar that
shows
> the text from the tool button hint only). The XO is a 1200x900 screen,
about a
> year or two back there was general consensus that we should try and make
> sure Activities worked well down too 1024x768 as that was common in
> emulated environments and regular laptops/desktops.
> 
> These 800x600 display machines will want to make sure they are running
> Sugar using an environmental variable of  SUGAR_SCALING=72, this will
> shrink the UI scale down to fit the lower screen resolution. SUGAR_SCALING
> currently only has an effect at either 72 (works well for 800x600 and
> 1024x768) or 100 (for 1200x900 or larger).
> 
> There will likely still be activities drawing their canvas with hard coded
> expectations of screen size, but hopefully these will be reasonably few in
> number by now. Please file a ticket if you find any (bugs.sugarlabs.org),
or
> feel free to email me and I'll try and chase them up.
> 
> One last additional issue you may find is with the dpi of text. Some
activities
> may seem to display overly large or small text fonts. This issue is quite
a black
> art to solve well, but still worth keeping an eye out for and reporting
back to
> the Activity developer.
> 
> Regards,
> --Gary
> 
> > maybe something to be aware of. Etoys appears to have been fixed
> already.
> >
> > On 05/02/2011 02:15 AM, nanon...@mediagala.com wrote:
> >> El pLan Ceibal en Uruguay está entregando a las Aaestras de Primaria
> >> las Olidata "Jump PC", con disco flash de 8 GB
> >>
> >> http://www.olidata.cl/index.php/netbook_web/show/id/10
> >>
> >> Las "olidata" se las dan a las MAestras a cambio de sus XO. Me parece
una
> decisión errada, ya que la intención del PLan ceibal es darles a las
Maestras
> una maquina más potente y al día (con respecto a las XO 1 de los niños, de
> hace dos o tres años), pero eso me parece un gran disparate, no puede ser
> que la MAestra no pueda hacer pruebas sobre las XO de los Niños.
> >>
> >> La MAestra tiene que entregar su XO 1.0 al Plan Ceibal (que le fue
> entregada hace un par de años) y el Plan ceibal se la cambia por una
Olidata.
> El Año pasado fueron compradas 30.000 olidata , según la pagina web
> institucional del Plan Ceibal.
> >>
> >> ---
> >>
> >> Una cosa que no me parece correcta es que  la laptop de maestra sea
> diferente ala XO: tiene más capacidad ara el Diario, eso es bueno(8 Gb
contra
> 1 Gb), pero la pantalla es diferente, el hardware es distinto, y el sugar
no
> funciona en forma identica, por lo tanto cualquier cosa que la Maestra use
> en su Laptop no podrá ser repetido por los alumnos de la misma forma.
> >>
> >>
> >> NO tiene sentido querer darle una maquina más potente a las MAestras,
> ya que si por ejemplo la Maestra hace una actividad Etoys en su casa ,
> usando sonidos, animación , etc etc, luego va a la clase y le dice a los
niños
> que lo repitan, pero resulta que lo mismo en las Xo tal vez va mas lento,
o no
> funciona igual, o se ve solo en partes
> >>
> >> Si se le quiere dar una maquina más potente a las Maestras, deberían
> dejar que tengan las dos: la "potente" y la XO normal de los Niños. En
este
> momento se les cambia la XO por la Olidata.
> >>
> >> NOTA: cuando digo "potente" (hablando de la Olidata ), es en tono
> jocoso, espero que se entienda.
> >>
> >>
> >> La Olidata Tiene la pantalla un poco más chica que la XO , de 7" y
> >> 800x400, en cambio la XO es de 7.5" y de 1200x900
> >>
> >>
> >> Debe ser por esa razón que ciertas actividades se ven 

[IAEP] EduJAM day 1.5 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

In the afternoon, our visit to the school was rained out. Instead we went to
a local festival, after which two teachers joined us on the bus. There is a
reoccurring theme of, "There is no benefit in complaining about the hurdles,
they are part of life. Let's, get the job doing."

As this series of post is dedicated to helping the technical side of the
project support the education side. The fascinating takeaway was how the
availability of the Aurora project is enabling other education projects.

The region we are visiting has been suffering from migration issues as
people move from agricultural regions to the urban centers because of the
availability of opportunities. One issues is the low attendance and
completion of residents to secondary education.  Historically, secondary
education required that student take a bus which was paid for by the parents
to attend high school.

Now, with the connectivity made available via the Aurora projects and
widespread  exposure of computers via the OLPC projects, adults are saying,
"Hmmm, is it possible for me to finish my high school education using these
tools?"  The local teachers are saying sure we can do this via a virtual
platform using existing tools such as Moodle.

The most interesting takeaway for me was the statement that content was not
an issue.  One teacher responded, "We are high school teacher. We understand
the required content and curriculum. We work with it every day." These
teacher just want the tools to distribute that content they already have.

Another couple of superstar teachers:)

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[IAEP] EduJAM day 1 Tour of Uruguay

[David Farning]

EduJam started with a bang this morning with visit to the Aurora project in
Tala, Uruguay.  The project, run by a local farmers cooperative, brings WIFI
to farmers outside of Tala.  The local telcos decided that it is not
profitable enough to bring service to the area. In true hacker  fashion they
built their own system.

The core of the system is a number of transmission towers which are
connected via directional antennas.  These towers can be comfortably located
about 10km apart. Each tower has a number of WIFI transmitters which serve
local families. If the family is close they can use standard WIFI. As they
move farther from the tower they use a systems of extenders to connect to
the nearest tower.

These towers are daisy chained to enable coverage for a wide area at a very
low price. Back in Tala, a nearby community with internet connectivity, the
projects connects via a standard DSL connection.

The most amazing part is that they can set up a complete tower, antennas,
and base station for less than $1,000 each. They fabricate the towers
themselves. The families which will be using the tower erect it themselves.
Some of the towers are taller than 20 meters. Pretty impressive. Once the
tower is up, project members come and install the transmitters.

It is a great example of hardware hacking. The local families, left behind
by the local telco, are scratching their own itch to provide connectivity
for their kids who use XOs and for themselves. The project members are
freely sharing their knowledge and experience with other co-operatives so
they can set up system for themselves and their children.

Absolutely brilliant idea which is being well executed :)  Formal session
was follow by an asado which gave us a great chance to talk with the people
with that set up the project.

david

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[IAEP] Awesome day 0 for eduJAM.

[David Farning]

Yesterday was have picture perfect start to eduJAM!

The day was planned by the Ceibal-volunteer associations as part of their
annual (sometime biannual) meeting. For lack of a better word, my Spanish is
still rather fuzzy, I will use the term Ceibal-volunteer associations to
describe Ceibal-Jam, Rap-Ceibal, and Flordeceibo.

Many of us in Sugar Labs are familiar with Ceibal-Jam, the software-arm of
the project, from the public work at http://ceibaljam.org/ . Particularly
interesting is their work on Sugar activities at
http://ceibaljam.org/drupal/?q=lista_proyectos .

Rap-Ceibal is the volunteer support organization. There public work is at
http://rapceibal.blogspot.com/ . They are doing really interesting work
creating regional centers. Basic service and support happens in the schools,
while more complicated or specialized service and support happen in the
regional centers.  It is a great model.

Thirdly, Flordeceibo, is the education arm that builds on the technical work
of Ceibal-Jam, Rap-Ceibal, and other organization to enable a efficient and
effective education for student in Uruguay. http://www.flordeceibo.edu.uy/

The morning started with the groups giving status reports of current
projects and roadmaps for next year. It was a great example of people
saying, 'we see a problem and we are trying to fix it.'

The afternoon was a series of videoconferences with distant schools. Groups
from various school shared their experiences and concern. This was followed
by an open discussion on how to meet their needs.

Midafternoon we broke up and shared a meal, ( The proper translation for the
dish was 'delicious heart attack on a plate' ) with others planning on
attending the Tour of Uruguay.

Overall two thumbs up to everyone involved. As special shout out to Antel, a
Uruguayan telecommunications firm, for providing the facilities -- which
included an video conferencing system that would make any hacker want to get
in there and take in apart to figure out how it works :) The moderator,
Latise (sp?) did an outstanding job of keeping the program running smoothly
and on schedule. Which can be harder than it appeared when you have a room
full of smart, curious, and passionate people.

david

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[IAEP] EduJam

[David Farning]

Today kicks off EduJAM.  EduJAM looks to be a great 1-to-1, OLPC, and Sugar
event with participants from many sectors of the community. Congratulation
to the great people from http://ceibaljam.org/ for hosting and coordinating
the event. 

There will be diverse offerings for participants, both volunteer and paid,
from a wide range of perspectives. Keeping in line with the goals of the
project, the overall structure of EduJAM moves from education to the
technology which supports education as the week progress.

April 30 -May 4 is the tour of Uruguay. ( http://ceibaljam.org/node/1233 )
The tour is great chance for teachers, teacher trainers, support staff,
deployment administrators, and other volunteers to see and discuss best
practices from three different schools in Uruguay.

May 5 - May 7 is the Summit itself. ( http://ceibaljam.org/?q=edujam2011 )
The summit is a great chance for educators and technical staff to come
together to see how they play equally important, yet separate, roles in
leveraging advances in technology to provide effective education.

May 7 - May is the code sprint
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EduJAM_Code_Sprint ) The code sprint is a
great chance for developers and support staff from deployments, OLPC,
Activity Central, and Sugar Labs to meet and work together on specific high
priority tasks and long term planning.

I look forward to see you all soon.

david

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+

[David Farning]

> Since this is the core point of disagreement within the community, the act
of
> accepting or rejecting the GPLv3 assumes for us the deeper meaning of
> refusing or endorsing TiVo-ization and DRM in conjunction with Sugar.

'Premature optimization is the root of all evil' -- Donald Knuth

The question is: Of the tasks Sugar Labs can do to improve the educational
valued of Sugar and collaboration within the ecosystem is tweaking the
license among the critical tasks?

david

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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] eduJAM! 2011: A Vibrant Summit With A Diverse Range Of Offerings

[David Farning]

> -Original Message-
> From: sugar-devel-boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:sugar-devel-
> boun...@lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Organización eduJAM! 2011
> Sent: Monday, March 21, 2011 2:05 PM
> To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] eduJAM! 2011: A Vibrant Summit With A Diverse Range Of
> Offerings
> 
> We are very excited to update you with the latest information about
> the�eduJAM! 2011  �summit. It is
> great to see that the different pieces of the puzzle are coming together for 
> what
> will undoubtedly be a landmark for the international community of educational
> free-software developers. Many of the main developers behind the Sugar
> platform will be present (Walter Bender, Aleksey Lim (alsroot), and Bernie
> Innocenti among�others  ). Additionally,
> people working on different OLPC deployments will be there which guarantees
> an excellent environment for moving the area of 1-to-1 computing in education
> projects and related discussions forward.
> 
> More than anything we aim to make the summit an event to create and amplify
> relationships in this community.
> 
> Place
> 
> The summit will take place at the Universidad del Trabajo del Uruguay (UTU) 
> and
> more specifically in its brand-new�PAOF building
>  �which is located in Ciudad Viaja, the 
> historic
> and commercial heart of Montevideo. Apart from this allowing us to work within
> a comfortable and versatile space, it also provides opportunities to enjoy 
> this
> beautiful part of the city during free hours.
> 
> Program
> 
> The summit will begin in the afternoon of�Thursday, May 5 with an informal
> reception aimed at allowing us to get to know each other as well as catch up.
> 
> On�Friday, May 6 the intensive work begins. This day will be organized in two
> tracks. In the morning we will focus on a broad vision of the core challenges
> encountered when designing a software platform aimed at learning in school
> environments in general and in 1-to-1 scenarios in particular. We can revise 
> and
> revisit these experiences in light of the experiences made within this 
> context in
> the past few years. What has and hasn�t worked when it comes to the
> software? How can we support the creation of effective learning communities?
> How can we make the development processes in such a diverse and distributed
> community more efficient? Which applications are we still missing? These are
> some of the questions which will be on the table.
> 
> In the afternoon the summit will turn sweet as we fully dedicate it to Sugar. 
> On
> the one hand we will hold a �Sugar Camp� where will discuss the current state
> of developments, local labs, the roadmap and how to optimize the work in the
> community.
> 
> Simultaneously on Friday afternoon there will be workshops aimed at people
> such as students and newcomers who want to learn how to develop for Sugar.
> 
> On�Saturday, May 7 the morning will be focused on the various experiences
> made in 1-to-1 projects. There will be talks by people working on different
> deployments, explaining what they have done and discussing the necessities and
> requirements when it comes to software platform. We consider this to be an
> important input for planning future work.

I would like to make a personal invitation to deployment developers and 
technical support staff to participate in the events Saturday, Sunday and (if 
possible) into the next week. On Saturday, Activity Central will create a 
'Critical Tasks' list. As we identify critical tasks which are shared across 
multiply deployments, we will add them to the Dextrose TODO list for our 
upcoming release and inclusion in the next OLPC OS release.

> This afternoon will be run in an �unconference� mode. This means that there
> will be different talks, workshops, and discussion rounds which will be 
> planned
> and decided upon by the participants on the spot. We thereby hope to learn
> more about the various ongoing projects, discuss roadmaps as well as form
> small development and investigation groups.

Starting Saturday afternoon Activity Central developers will run a 'Critical 
Tasks' workshop to help deployments identify and work on their important bugs 
and feature requests. Through the follow week AC developers will be available 
to:
1. Help you solve those critical tasks.
2. Help you push those solutions upstream to OLPC and Sugar Labs.
3. Help you identify and coordinate with other deployments and organizations 
that are facing similar issues.

Look forward to see you at eduJAM.
david

 
> Conozco Uruguay Tour
> 
> Independent of the summit, a variety of activities will take place in the days
> leading up to it. These activities are aimed at people who want to explore the
> experiences Uruguay is making with Plan Ceibal in more depth. They will take
> place between Saturday, April 30 a

Re: [IAEP] Sugar Labs 2010-2011 Election Information

[David Farning]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Luke Faraone  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sorry for the confusion regarding the 2010-2011 elections. We all could
> have done a better job promoting it. For that reason, I'm adjusting the
> election schedule[1] as follows:
>
>  * 2010-11-01 23:59 EDT: Candidate list closed. (per SLOB motion)
>  * 2010-11-10 23:59 EST: Deadline for applications for membership.
> Applications after this date will not be processed before the election.
>  * 2010-11-13: All valid 2010-2011 applications processed.
>  * 2010-11-14 17:00 EST: Ballots sent by email, start of voting period.
>  * 2010-11-28 17:00 EST: Voting period ends.

I wonder if Luke wrote this email on his industry leading mobile
device while attending the 'Rally to Restore Sanity.' [1]

david

1. http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/

david
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[IAEP] Moving forward.

[David Farning]

Yesterday I sent a rather blunt email on my concerns about the
project.  It seems the observations resonated with many people while
striking several nerves.  The volume of private mail or CCed mail (to
a subset of the Sugar Labs participants) responses was unexpectedly
high.

The five main themes of the responses are:
1. "Could you possibility be any more abstract?"
2. "Several of the points are valid.  Here are my
responses/suggestions. This should be on a public thread, but someone
else will have to start it."
3. "The core problem is trust."
4. "This conversation is like an iceberg, the 'community' only sees
10% and not the other 90%."
5. "Dave you are just a jerk, now shut up."

For better of worse, all five points are valid.  I am a bumbling jerk
who is struggling to rebuild community trust without airing anyone's
dirty laundry, including my own.

To put all of my cards on the table:
1. The ideas driving OLPC and Sugar are sound.
2. Sugar Labs will continue to fragment until the issue of trust is resolved.
3. Because of this, I left Sugar Labs to start a business which
provides service and support for Sugar.
4. I need Sugar to succeed. I need OLPC to succeed.
5. I have been trying to operate 'under the radar' because some in
Sugar Labs and OLPC have contacted individuals I am working with and
'suggested' that they not work with me.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.  I get pissed off about
the lack of trust and community building in Sugar Labs, so I go off
and form a fork which operates largely in secret.

Two years ago, I suggested that the over sight board appoint Walter
Bender as Executive Director of Sugar Labs so he would be able to
speak on behalf of Sugar Labs.  He had three skills which Sugar Labs
needed. 1) He was able to clearly and effectively communicate the
goals of Sugar and the mission of Sugar Labs. 2) He was able to create
an identity for Sugar Labs outside of OLPC. 3) He was a tireless
advocate for Sugar.  In the past two years Sugar Labs has progressed,
largely because of Walter.  The goal of sugar and Sugar labs is well
understood. Sugar Labs has a clear identity.

Now, Sugar Labs has different needs; pragmatic bridge building between
individuals and organization.  It is time to look for someone with
those particular skill to lead/herd Sugar Labs forward.  As such I
would like to recommend that SLOB ask and appoint Adam Holt as the
next Executive Director of Sugar Labs.

david
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Re: [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer

[David Farning]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Bastien  wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> I think everyone agrees that Tomeu stepping down as a maintainer is a
> big loss.  I join my voice to those who already expressed this and my
> thanks to Tomeu for all the crazy work he's been achieving here - and
> it's not only lines of code, it's also a general welcoming and helping
> attitude, which is priceless.
>
> I did a small experiment: I clicked on the "Getting involved" button.
>
> I'm not falling into those categories: developer, designer, educator,
> content writer.  I can help as a translator (I did so in the past) and
> as a "people person".
>
> So I clicked on the "People person" button.
>
> I understand the projects listed here and how I can help them: marketing
> team, documentation team, deployment team, local labs, soas.
>
> Here is my list (preference order) :
>
> - *Local labs*: I will try to have more people involved in Sugar from
>  France.  Since early october, we have at least two new members of OLPC
>  who will work more on Sugar.
>
> - *Sugar on a stick*: together with other members, I will try to develop
>  a french Soas.
>
> - *Marketing team*: [sadly enough, we don't seem to have news from Sean.
>  Hopefully nothing bad happened to him - he's usually very responsive.]
>  My role here could be a "general outreach" role: trying to translate
>  marketing documents, speak more about Sugar in events, etc.

Bastien,
Thank you for all you have done and being the first person to
_step_up_ and identify yourself as willing (and from your past
performance -- able) to commit to working on a much needed set of
tasks.

> I'm addressing this message to you since your the contact for this role.
>
> :)
>
> There is something I miss in the list of "teams/projects" for "people
> persons": community management.  This is very different from marketing
> and outreach.  Maybe this project/role could be advertized somewhere
> on the wiki.
>
> I'll keep this list updated about progress I make in this role.
>
> PS: I don't dwell on Sugar criticism because I fail to grok how this
> could help us go ahead and keep moving forward.

+1.  The focus is not criticism or even discussion.  The criticism
is a call to action -- Sugar Labs needs help.

The focus is the generous response of people like you going though the
process of:
1.  Determining what can be done to make Sugar and Sugar Labs better.
2. Identifying how you can apply your time and specific talents to those needs.
3. Making the public commitment to work on a few specific needs.

david

>  Criticism is useful
> when resources are growing, not when they are shrinking.
>
> --
>  Bastien
>
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Re: [IAEP] stepping down as maintainer

[David Farning]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> for personal reasons have to drastically reduce my involvement in the project.
>
> Will be leaving maintenance of my modules and unsubscribing from the
> mailing lists. My place on the board is vacant from now on and I'll be
> adding to the wiki the new vacancies:
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vacancies
>
> Cheers and good luck,
>
> Tomeu

Sugar Labs lost its lead developer.  It is unfortunate that no-one has
done a public review of the reasons and implications of Tomeu quiting.
 Tomeu's leaving is significant enough that Sugar Labs should take a
hard look at what is working, what is not working, and how to fix the
pieces that are not working.

At the risk of angering pretty much everybody Sugar Labs has three
fundamental problems.  Sugar Labs is optimistic to the point of
untruthfulness.  Sugar Labs is lead by veto rather than vision.  There
is a lack of accountability to stakeholders.

Sugar Labs is optimistic to the point of untruthfulness.  The main
_symptom_ of this is the current state of Sugar Labs.  Sugar is not
perfect. Sugar Labs is not perfect.

The _disease_ is an adherence to faulty premises rather then the use
of the Scientific Method of: Ask a question. Do background research.
Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment.
Analyze your data and draw a conclusion. Communicate your results.

Premise 1. Sugar is open source, written in python, and the source is
easily available.  Therefore kids will develop and improve Sugar.
What fraction of useful and usable improvements have been committed
into sugar by the target users.  The key metric is commit ratio.
Everyone has an antidote about some budding hacker.  As with the patch
acceptance process, developing Sugar requires more than solving logic
problems.

In theory this premise is sound, and desirable, the overall technical
capabilities of a nation will improve as more people are exposed to
Sugar at an early age.  The question become what is the time lag
between exposure to Sugar and useful contribution to Sugar?

Premise 2. Sugar is open source, written in python, and the source is
easily available.  Therefore deployments will develop Sugar.  What
fraction of useful and usable improvements have been committed into
sugar by deployments.

In theory this premise is sound, and desirable, Sugar deployments and
their associated support infrastructure provide a catalyst for
building local technical capability. The question becomes, considering
the limited resources of deployments, is the benefit of contributing
upstream worth the cost?

Premise 3.  Any problems with Sugar are because the user, teacher, or
deployment is not smart or motivated enough.  What are the usability
concerns of users, teachers, and deployments? How are those concerns
being addressed?

In theory this is true yet undesirable.  A significantly motived
person _can_ figure out just about anything.  The primary decision
making factor for users, teachers, and deployments is marginal
benefit.  Does using and learning to use the laptop/Sugar prove a
marginal benefit over other learning opertunities.

Sugar Labs is lead by veto rather than vision. A _symptom_ is the
development process. It it easy to have fix commited to Fedora or
OLPC.  It is hard to have a fix commited to Sugar Labs.  When someone
sends a useful fix to either OLPC or Fedora, a senior developer takes
the patch, review it, fixes it up (if necessary) and thanks the
contributor.  This provides an incentive and on-ramp for less
experienced developers to participate and contribute.

Sugar Labs rejects most patches.  Once a patch is technically correct,
which can take several iterations for a new developer, it is forward
to another developer for their vote of approval.  The end result is
that very few people bother to submitted patches upstream.

The _disease_ is a marginalization of anyone who dissents.  As a
result no one is willing to take a risk.  There is an unwritten
checklist for participation.  1) Are you a knowledgeable, experienced,
and patient open source developer? 2) Is your goal open source
advocacy? 3) Are you a strict constructionist? 4)  This results in
very low participation in Sugar Labs.

There is the lack of accountability to stakeholders.  The Board of
Directors of an non-profit organization the board reports to
stakeholders, particularly the local communities which the nonprofit
serves.  The Executive Director is responible for carrying out the
strategic plans and policies as established by the board of directors.

As a starting point for bringing Sugar Labs out its current crisis, I
suggest the following plan:

1. Each Oversight board member, or candidate, identify a stakeholder
and spend the next 12 months advocating for that stakeholder.
Advocating includes: Identify the specif needs and goals of the
stakeholder.  Identify the resources that stakeholder can contribute
to Sugar Labs.  Identify how Sugar or

Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] What Sugar ships (was Re: Proposal release management)

[David Farning]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 9:52 AM, Bert Freudenberg  wrote:
> On 24.06.2010, at 15:29, David Farning wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Bert Freudenberg  
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> To that extent I proposed to the Etoys developers to follow the Sugar 
>>> development cycle more closely. And that's what we're going to do.
>>
>> Thanks Bert.  That will help those of us working downstream a great
>> deal.  As a side note, what is the situation with Etoys vs scratch?
>
> Why do you think there's a "vs"? Both have their place.

I apologize, it would have been better if I had phrased the question
as, "Can you explain the differences and similarities between scratch
and etoys and their different use cases?"  My original question was
rather off the cuff and off topic:(

The teachers I talk to seem to have a similar misunderstanding to my
knowledge gap.  (Note these are neither squeak, etoys, or sugar
experts) That etoys is a rebranded squeak for sugar.

Many developers (again non-squeak, etoys, or sugar experts) are under
the impression that etoys is squeak without the licensesing issues.

>> Many teachers are very familiar with (and love) scratch and wonder why
>> sugar ships Etoys:-(
>>
>> david
>
> While Scratch is less powerful than Etoys, it certainly is more polished and 
> easier to get into. That was one of its design goals - to let teenagers have 
> immediate fun in an hour after school, without needing too much guidance. 
> Etoys OTOH was designed to be used by a skilled teacher as part of a larger 
> curriculum - and it is a prototype that "escaped into the wild" without 
> seeing much polishing.
>
> So I can see why teachers love Scratch. I love Scratch, too. It requires much 
> less effort to get started. Certainly enough, Scratch comes pre-installed on 
> many OLPC builds (and OLPC recently sponsored me to add basic Journal 
> support). Besides, the xo bundle can easily be downloaded.
>
> But for inclusion in Sugar itself there are more criteria than just ease of 
> use. Like the willingness of developers to work in the Sugar community. Which 
> is almost synonymous to the development process itself being open. Or making 
> serious efforts to "fit" into Sugar - be that UI design, or supporting 
> collaboration etc.
>
> Etoys is working in that direction, and also welcoming contributions. The 
> Scratch developers have other priorities. In a way, Scratch is so beautifully 
> simple *because* its development is so tightly controlled. It's like an Apple 
> product compared to a Linux one. The Linux program might be more powerful, 
> but many people would still prefer the simpler, polished, less confusing 
> Apple product. Others see beyond the flaws of the Linux program, and some 
> dive in and help improving it. Given time, money, and effort it might even 
> attract users in the general public ;)
>
> Btw, a good way for teachers to learn about Etoys is attending Squeakfest:
>
>        http://squeakfest.org/
>
> Coming back to your question, "why Sugar ships Etoys", it's because Etoys 
> developers care about it, and the others find it to be useful. Which is the 
> case for anything that Sugar ships.

Thanks.  Would you mind turning your answer into a blog post to which
I can refer people when they ask about etoys and squeak... and how
they fit together.  It comes up alot:)

One of the downstream projects I am working on is USR which stands for
Ubuntu [Sugar,Squeak, Scratch] Remix.  Once we have the Sugar part
stabilized we will start working on the Squeak part.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Proposal release management

[David Farning]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Bert Freudenberg  wrote:
> On 24.06.2010, at 09:32, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> in May I tried to find someone to replace me as release manager [1] for
>> 0.90, but as nobody has stepped up to do the job as we defined it I
>> decided that it will be best to keep this role for some more time. I
>> think it will be important for Sugar that we keep some continuation of
>> the processes that we have been setting up during the last years. It
>> would also be very good if someone would like to lend a hand with this
>> or shadow me for future tasks so more people in Sugar Labs have direct
>> hands-on knowledge.
>>
>> We defined the role of the release manager in the past 3 releases like
>> the following:
>>
>> * setting the schedule
>> * make sure that the Feature process is followed by the submitters [2]
>> * keeping the wiki updated about the released modules and making sure to
>> have final release notes available
>> * sending email reminders about approaching Freezes, tarball due dates etc
>>
>> The schedule would be based on the GNOME releases, a 6 month release
>> cycle. As there is not much time left for 0.90 [3] I think we should
>> mainly focus on stabilizing and landing the features that were left over
>> from the last release. I would start to announce a time frame for future
>> releases so that future development can go on. New Features would be
>> handled by the Feature process, as it has been the case in the past.
>>
>> What do others think about this?

Thanks Simon.  That is a good plan.  You have been doing an
outstanding job implementing it for the last several cycles.

> I think thanks are in order. It's a solid, low-risk plan for the "last mile" 
> in our development cycle. Now we just need to get our acts together in 
> covering the middle ground, so you actually have something to release :)
>
> To that extent I proposed to the Etoys developers to follow the Sugar 
> development cycle more closely. And that's what we're going to do.

Thanks Bert.  That will help those of us working downstream a great
deal.  As a side note, what is the situation with Etoys vs scratch?
Many teachers are very familiar with (and love) scratch and wonder why
sugar ships Etoys:-(

david

> Thank you for stepping up again!
>
> - Bert -
>
>
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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] RFC: F11-0.88 as a Sugar Labs Project

[David Farning]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Mel Chua  wrote:
> On 06/17/2010 10:28 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> At the next meeting, I would like to propose the Fedora 11 with Sugar
>> 0.88 builds for the XO-1 and XO-1.5 as a new official project.
>>
>> It is sponsored jointly by Paraguay Educa and Activity Central,
>> coordinated by me and hosted by the Sugar Labs infrastructure:
>>
>>    http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team/Sugar-0.88
>>    http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-0.88/
>>
>> If the board approves, I will add a link to the sidebar, near Sugar on a
>> Stick, and create a top-level homepage with content directed at users.
>>
>> I need help picking a pronounceable name, F11-0.88 is revolting.
>
> Posted to
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Oversight_Board/Minutes#Agenda_items as a
> motion, since all the links are public anyhow and the discussion will be
> as well.
>

I would encourage that  F11-S0.88 _not_ become an official Sugar Labs
at this time.  My biggest concern is maintenance responsible.  If the
project becomes an official project, Sugar Labs has an implied
maintenance responsibility.   If F11-S0.88 sucks, it will cast a long
shadow on the upstream project Sugar Labs not the downstream project
where that shadow belongs.

On the other hand, if Sugar Labs would like to assume maintenance
responsibility they are welcome to roll the project into SL.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Health nuts

[David Farning]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Beth Santos  wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> Looking for someone who can get me in touch with people who might be
> interested in developing health-focused Etoys education software- nutrition,
> sanitation, HIV/AIDS awareness, malaria prevention, anatomy, etc. This is an
> initiative I want to grow in countries in Africa and could use some content
> help. Whether it's international health professionals or computer
> programmers who want to make the actual games, let me know.
>
>
A rather minor point

As we talk about content to augment teaching specific concepts or tasks ,it
might be better to use the educator terminology of learning object[1] rather
than game.  I see rather a lot of push back when talking to teachers about
'games', but the parse 'learning object' seems to resonate well:)

david

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_object

> Beth
>
>
> ---
> *Beth Santos*
> Outreach Coordinator
> Waveplace Foundation
>
> Tel: +1 610 797 3100 x 44
> Fax: +1 610 797 3199
> Cell: +1 603 661 1273
> http://www.waveplace.org
>
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Re: [IAEP] maintaining activities (was Re: Too many open fronts?)

[David Farning]

 We have to focus on polish, on getting something useful in the hands
 of children. On making a difference there. We cannot leave XO-1.5
 unfinished. We have to hear the SoaS crowd when they point out that
 very few activities are shippable.
>>>
>>> I agree in that focusing is very important. But paradoxically, you can
>>> be in a situation in which individuals are focused on their work but
>>> the organization as a whole isn't focused at all.
>>
>> One possible approach is for Sugar Labs to focus on being an
>> innovative upstream while downstreams like Activity Central, SoaS, and
>> deployments focus on the polish. Activity Central is pulling
>> deplolyment level polish into Sugar.
>
> Will all those downstreams work on polish separately or will they
> cooperate and pool resources in a common place?

The best answer I can give is "It depends."  Typically, upstreams and
downstreams tend to branch and merge.

A good example is the kernel. Over the last 5-10 years many projects
and companies have tired to branch... and maintain that branch.  They
realized that maintaining a branch is _really_ expensive.  The
remaining (successful) projects and companies work very hard to stay
in sync with the upstream kernel.

FWIW, at Activity Central we have no infrastructure of our own.  (This
is not completely true, bernie does send around his "hot bugs" list
for members of the Deployment Support Network. Once the bugs have been
assigned, all review happens on the lists or irc.)Everything thing
happens in either Sugar Labs, OLPC, Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora.  This
is intentional.  Rather than ship anything custom, we must push it
upstream.

The key is that we, and others, search for common goals and push them
forward.  A successful open source ecosystem depends on finding
intersections rather than forcing unions.

david
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Re: [IAEP] maintaining activities (was Re: Too many open fronts?)

[David Farning]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 1:41 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 06:17, Martin Langhoff
>  wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Bernie Innocenti  wrote:
>>> El Wed, 09-06-2010 a las 02:59 -0700, Yioryos Asprobounitis escribió:
 However, the 20month+ old F9/0.82, os802 build remains the official XO-1 
 build.
>>>
>>> It's just a formality, nobody has been doing any work on it for years.
>>
>> To clarify: I am working on it. and it mainly helps deployments that
>> are implementing security. It is taking ages because, well, I am doing
>> the work of 5 people.
>>
>> I share Yiorios' concerns. Both OLPC and SL are overreaching wildly.
>>
>> We have to focus on polish, on getting something useful in the hands
>> of children. On making a difference there. We cannot leave XO-1.5
>> unfinished. We have to hear the SoaS crowd when they point out that
>> very few activities are shippable.
>
> I agree in that focusing is very important. But paradoxically, you can
> be in a situation in which individuals are focused on their work but
> the organization as a whole isn't focused at all.

One possible approach is for Sugar Labs to focus on being an
innovative upstream while downstreams like Activity Central, SoaS, and
deployments focus on the polish. Activity Central is pulling
deplolyment level polish into Sugar.

dav

> To have focus at the team level we need someone who takes a step back
> from the task at hand and takes a look at where we are and where we
> are supposed to go.
>
> I think teams provide a space for that and allows for different people
> to take that reflective role at periodic times.
>
> We used to have an Activity Team and it actually saw the importance of
> maintaining existing activities so had processes for adoption and for
> finding the resources. Unfortunately, as often happens in efforts like
> ours, the person driving that effort had to attend to other matters
> and the team languished.
>
> But we still have people reading our mailing lists with the skills and
> interest to maintain activities and update them to work on other
> platforms than the XO-1 with 8.2.x, but we lack focus.
>
> Can we find someone who wants to coordinate the team?
>
> It's not such a big role in terms of work, the responsibilities are
> the following:
>
> - keep the mission statement updated in the wiki page
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team ,
>
> - keep the members list updated,
>
> - call for biweekly meetings and moderate them,
>
> - publish meeting minutes and logs.
>
> But this relatively small effort can bring the focus we need.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> 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
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>>
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Re: [IAEP] Quote, docs (was Re: Sugar Digest 2010-05-20)

[David Farning]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 11:42, Walter Bender  wrote:
>> ==Sugar Digest==
>
>> One of the nice things as you walk through the museum is that on
>> almost every wall is a quote about play. They have a nice collection
>> of quotes on line as well (See
>> http://www.museumofplay.org/about_play/quotes.html). I read them a
>> favorite quote from Marvin Minsky, which seemed to resonate with them:
>>
>>    "The playfulness of childhood is the most demanding teacher we have."
>
> Thanks. I added that one to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai/Quotes
>
>> We talked about how we might engage them in some informal learning
>> activities using Sugar.
>
> I have had such talks with The Tech Museum of San Jose and the
> Exploratorium, and intend to talk with others. The Tech invites
> interactive exhibit designs.
>
>> I had written an NSF grant a while back: "Adding depth to and building
>> community within informal education", which was rejected, but is worth
>> pursing nonetheless.
>
> Would you be intereted i joii i a a appi
>> I'd proposed to explore how children's activities at informal learning
>> venues can be extended by providing learners with inexpensive,
>> ubiquitous access to learning software (Sugar on a Stick). By
>> designing, developing, and testing a proof of concept that combines
>> informal learning activities with in-depth follow up at home or in the
>> classroom we still hope to demonstrate a learning ecology that
>> "increases public interest in, understanding of, and engagement with
>> science, technology, engineering, and mathematics."
>>
>> Specifically, I proposed to leverage Sugar on a Stick to promote the
>> use of Sugar in informal learning settings: prototyping Sugar-based
>> exhibit kiosks in museums and libraries that will facilitate visitor
>> interactions. Visitors will be given a Sugar-on-a-Stick USB storage
>> device with which they can make bookmarks of exhibits that they
>> visited, found interesting, or saved data from. Exhibit designers can
>> use kiosks to collect visitor information and offer additional
>> activities and data that visitors can work with when back at school or
>> home. Activities can be downloaded to the Sugar-on-a-Stick device from
>> the kiosk. The work done by visitors can be incorporated into the
>> exhibit itself and featured on line, with the potential to reach a
>> broader audience.
>>
>> I still hope to learn how the data- and instrumentation-rich
>> facilities found in informal learning settings and Sugar might be
>> combined to further engage the interest of learners in scientific and
>> technological literacy. I hypothesized that by giving visitors the
>> ability to take programs and data home with them, we will be able to
>> challenge them with more in-depth and engaging problem solving. Giving
>> them activities to take home, connecting these activities to other
>> learning experiences and interests, and connecting these activities to
>> a community of learners are significant enhancements to the status quo
>> of informal learning.
>>
>> We need to evaluate the technical, logistical, and pedagogical impacts
>> on the museum exhibit experience, library digital and human resources,
>> and education programs s that we can develop an implementation guide
>> for informal-learning professionals.
>>
>> === Help wanted ===
>>
>> 2. We have a number of vacancies (See
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Vacancies). Many of these positions
>> require organization as opposed to technical skills and only a
>> commitment of a few hours per week.
>
> Clearly I should offer to take this one on:
>
> Document team coordinator: carries administrative tasks such as
> organizing regular meetings, keep the TODO list updated, keep the
> membership list, and makes sure that the team has clear goals and is
> kept focused. I'll look over the latest at
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation_Team and see if I have any
> questions.

That would be excellent.  There is a small team working on API
documentation.  For the next 6 months, they will be working on
'restructured text' API documentation for core sugar documentation.  I
believe that they have settled on sphinx as the preferred tool.

I hope you find this a useful addition to the documentation team and
useful addition to the Sugar Labs.

david

>> regards.
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> --
>> Walter Bender
>> Sugar Labs
>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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>
>
>
> --
> Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
> Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
> http://www.earthtreasury.org/
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Supporting Sugar .88 on the XO1

[David Farning]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 02:04, David Farning  wrote:
>> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Paul Fox  wrote:
>>> david wrote:
>>>  > As Bernie announced, we working on supporting Sugar .88 on the XO-1.
>>>
>>> hi david --
>>>
>>> for those of us joining this thread late, can you expand on what/who
>>> you mean by "we"?  (or tell me to read the archives, if that's
>>> more appropriate.)
>>
>> Sorry, By we, I mean Activity Central and compnay that Bernie,
>> Caroline, and I have started to support OLPC and Sugar deployments.
>>
>> It is going to take me awhile to figure out how to communicate with
>> the community.  I would like to keep the larger Sugar and OLPC
>> projects aware of what our company is doing.  But, I don't what it to
>> sound like a press release of pitch for the company:)
>
> Any blog we could syndicate in the planet(s)?

Excellent point,

I'll start a blog and request that it be syndicated on the Sugar Labs
and OLPC planets.

> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> david
>>> paul
>>>
>>>
>>>  > This projects is customer driven by the deployment in Paraguay.  They,
>>>  > along with bernie, made a decision that it would be more useful,
>>>  > usable, and cost effective to settle on .88 rather than .82.  This
>>>  > strictly a decision made by a single deployment, which I support.
>>>  >
>>>  > As an ecosystem we can make lists of Pros on Cons why this is a good
>>>  > or bad decision and why I am an idiot.  At the end of the day this was
>>>  > a decision made by a deployment.  The primary reason for this decision
>>>  > is that the deployment does not yet has an established base of .82
>>>  > machines.  Something we need to be aware of as developers is that
>>>  > deployments think on a much longer scale.  As developers, if we have a
>>>  > bug we can commit a fix and rebuild within a few days.  Deployments
>>>  > can take weeks if not months to push a minor update.
>>>  >
>>>  > Major version upgrades are something developers can do every six
>>>  > months.  From my experience a couple couple of weeks of 'hmmm,  better
>>>  > file a bug on that' and I have well running machines after an upgrade.
>>>  >  For a enterprise, such as a deployment, the decision to update
>>>  > becomes much harder and takes much longer to implement. As Martin
>>>  > pointed out, a significant amount of Quality Assurance goes into a
>>>  > deployment upgrade.  Not only do the hardware, OS, and learning
>>>  > platform need to work together, all infrastructure, activities and
>>>  > third party applications must also work after the update.  The problem
>>>  > just got significantly harder:)  If I hit a bug while while sitting in
>>>  > my office that is one thing.  If a teacher hits a bug where the
>>>  > computers no longer connect to the server that is another thing
>>>  > entirely.
>>>  >
>>>  > On the other hand, there have been several significant improvements in
>>>  > both Sugar and Fedora over the last couple of releases.  It would be
>>>  > valuable to make those improvement available to end users.
>>>  >
>>>  > My research has indicated that education institutions find that 3
>>>  > years is the right balance between stability and improved
>>>  > functionality of new software.  Because to the newness of the Sugar 2
>>>  > years is a reasonable first round of updates due to the higher than
>>>  > normal increases in usefulness and usability.
>>>  >
>>>  > Blame and credit are important motivators in this game:( As such, if
>>>  > we fail, it is the fault of Bernie, paraguayeduca, and I for: 1)
>>>  > starting with a bad premise, 2) making bad technical decision, or 3)
>>>  > making bad operational decisions.  If we fail it will be due to the
>>>  > cooperative efforts of deployments, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and other
>>>  > interested third parties.
>>>  >
>>>  > david
>>>  > ___
>>>  > Sugar-devel mailing list
>>>  > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>>>  > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>> =-
>>>  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
>>>
>> ___
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Supporting Sugar .88 on the XO1

[David Farning]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Paul Fox  wrote:
> david wrote:
>  > As Bernie announced, we working on supporting Sugar .88 on the XO-1.
>
> hi david --
>
> for those of us joining this thread late, can you expand on what/who
> you mean by "we"?  (or tell me to read the archives, if that's
> more appropriate.)

Sorry, By we, I mean Activity Central and compnay that Bernie,
Caroline, and I have started to support OLPC and Sugar deployments.

It is going to take me awhile to figure out how to communicate with
the community.  I would like to keep the larger Sugar and OLPC
projects aware of what our company is doing.  But, I don't what it to
sound like a press release of pitch for the company:)

david
> paul
>
>
>  > This projects is customer driven by the deployment in Paraguay.  They,
>  > along with bernie, made a decision that it would be more useful,
>  > usable, and cost effective to settle on .88 rather than .82.  This
>  > strictly a decision made by a single deployment, which I support.
>  >
>  > As an ecosystem we can make lists of Pros on Cons why this is a good
>  > or bad decision and why I am an idiot.  At the end of the day this was
>  > a decision made by a deployment.  The primary reason for this decision
>  > is that the deployment does not yet has an established base of .82
>  > machines.  Something we need to be aware of as developers is that
>  > deployments think on a much longer scale.  As developers, if we have a
>  > bug we can commit a fix and rebuild within a few days.  Deployments
>  > can take weeks if not months to push a minor update.
>  >
>  > Major version upgrades are something developers can do every six
>  > months.  From my experience a couple couple of weeks of 'hmmm,  better
>  > file a bug on that' and I have well running machines after an upgrade.
>  >  For a enterprise, such as a deployment, the decision to update
>  > becomes much harder and takes much longer to implement. As Martin
>  > pointed out, a significant amount of Quality Assurance goes into a
>  > deployment upgrade.  Not only do the hardware, OS, and learning
>  > platform need to work together, all infrastructure, activities and
>  > third party applications must also work after the update.  The problem
>  > just got significantly harder:)  If I hit a bug while while sitting in
>  > my office that is one thing.  If a teacher hits a bug where the
>  > computers no longer connect to the server that is another thing
>  > entirely.
>  >
>  > On the other hand, there have been several significant improvements in
>  > both Sugar and Fedora over the last couple of releases.  It would be
>  > valuable to make those improvement available to end users.
>  >
>  > My research has indicated that education institutions find that 3
>  > years is the right balance between stability and improved
>  > functionality of new software.  Because to the newness of the Sugar 2
>  > years is a reasonable first round of updates due to the higher than
>  > normal increases in usefulness and usability.
>  >
>  > Blame and credit are important motivators in this game:( As such, if
>  > we fail, it is the fault of Bernie, paraguayeduca, and I for: 1)
>  > starting with a bad premise, 2) making bad technical decision, or 3)
>  > making bad operational decisions.  If we fail it will be due to the
>  > cooperative efforts of deployments, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and other
>  > interested third parties.
>  >
>  > david
>  > ___
>  > Sugar-devel mailing list
>  > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>  > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
> =-
>  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
>
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[IAEP] Supporting Sugar .88 on the XO1

[David Farning]

As Bernie announced, we working on supporting Sugar .88 on the XO-1.
This projects is customer driven by the deployment in Paraguay.  They,
along with bernie, made a decision that it would be more useful,
usable, and cost effective to settle on .88 rather than .82.  This
strictly a decision made by a single deployment, which I support.

As an ecosystem we can make lists of Pros on Cons why this is a good
or bad decision and why I am an idiot.  At the end of the day this was
a decision made by a deployment.  The primary reason for this decision
is that the deployment does not yet has an established base of .82
machines.  Something we need to be aware of as developers is that
deployments think on a much longer scale.  As developers, if we have a
bug we can commit a fix and rebuild within a few days.  Deployments
can take weeks if not months to push a minor update.

Major version upgrades are something developers can do every six
months.  From my experience a couple couple of weeks of 'hmmm,  better
file a bug on that' and I have well running machines after an upgrade.
 For a enterprise, such as a deployment, the decision to update
becomes much harder and takes much longer to implement. As Martin
pointed out, a significant amount of Quality Assurance goes into a
deployment upgrade.  Not only do the hardware, OS, and learning
platform need to work together, all infrastructure, activities and
third party applications must also work after the update.  The problem
just got significantly harder:)  If I hit a bug while while sitting in
my office that is one thing.  If a teacher hits a bug where the
computers no longer connect to the server that is another thing
entirely.

On the other hand, there have been several significant improvements in
both Sugar and Fedora over the last couple of releases.  It would be
valuable to make those improvement available to end users.

My research has indicated that education institutions find that 3
years is the right balance between stability and improved
functionality of new software.  Because to the newness of the Sugar 2
years is a reasonable first round of updates due to the higher than
normal increases in usefulness and usability.

Blame and credit are important motivators in this game:( As such, if
we fail, it is the fault of Bernie, paraguayeduca, and I for: 1)
starting with a bad premise, 2) making bad technical decision, or 3)
making bad operational decisions.  If we fail it will be due to the
cooperative efforts of deployments, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and other
interested third parties.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.

[David Farning]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Martin Langhoff
 wrote:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Jonas Smedegaard  wrote:
>> Making deals with
>> commercial partners have a tendency to spawn discrete communication and work
>> shared openly but as a result, not a peer process (a famous example is that
>> of Google Android release process of linux kernel patches).
>
> Actually, most of the kernel development these days is funded. The
> planning, design, development, review and rework are done openly. All
> teh technical work is open and transparent, that's all.
>
> Android, of a thousand of funded projects, has been mismanaged from
> the PoV of the kernel upstream. Sure. But the correlation you are
> trying to make is not there. The evidence is overwhelmingly on the
> other side.
>
> cheers,
>

All of the participants on this thread have identified potential
strengths and potential weakness of commercial projects working
together with community projects.

I expect that transparency will be my biggest problem.  Not because I
am doing anything super secret, but because I am reaching outside of
the open source community and working mostly with educators and
deployers.  Many of them have little of no experience working with
open source development methodologies.  Thus it will take ramp up time
to acclimate new developers to the community.

WRT to crowding out.  This tends to happen when 'paid developers'
operate as a block and give each other more authority then developers
outside the block.  As such _all_ of the Sugar developers_ I am
working with are doing bug fixes -- which must be pushed upstream.  It
is pretty hard to argue that fixing bugs, many of which have been open
for years, is crowding out others.  This issue may come up again as
the particular group of developers I am working with become more
experience and earn commit and maintainer authority.

The bottom line is that some communities and companies find ways to
work effectively together and others don't.

david
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[IAEP] Working with a commercial entity.

[David Farning]

There has been discussion on development processes and a development
team lead over the past couple of days.  As this discussion moves
forward, I would like the community to consider the effects of working
with commercial entity.

Over the past couple of months I have been exploring business
opportunities to promote the adoption and development of Sugar.  One
of these opportunities is a service and support business for
deployments.  As such, we are building network of developers to work
on deployment specific issues.

One consideration is that these deployment specific issues are often
boring -- stuff like bug fixes.  As such we are paying the developers
the going rate rate for developers in their country or region.  This
brings three advantages:
1. The deployment issues are fixed.
2. These fixes are pushed upstream for inclusion into Sugar.
3.  There is a growing pool of skilled developers, with knowledge of
how to work with the Sugar community, co-located with deployment

david
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Re: [IAEP] stepping down as development team coordinator

[David Farning]

Thanks for all of your hard work over the years.  You have left your
excellent mark on Sugar and Sugar Labs.

You have carried a heavy load for a long time!  I hope that we
continue to see your participation in the Sugar / OLPC ecosystem.  (I
am already seeing your name pop up around gnome:)

david

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't have much time these days, so I'm dropping the development
> team coordinator role in order to have a bit more of time to focus on
> the other stuff.
>
> I have added the following description to the Vacancies page:
>
> * Development team coordinator: carries administrative tasks such as
> organizing regular meetings, keep the TODO list updated, keep the
> membership list, and makes sure that the team has clear goals and is
> kept focused.
>
> We are seeing an increased interest on the development of Sugar, so I
> hope somebody will find time to take this.
>
> Note that we are still missing people who want to coordinate the
> community and deployment teams, and also miss a release manager. These
> are much more important IMO than the developer team coordinator.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
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[IAEP] deployment focused event

[David Farning]

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
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[IAEP] Fedora Summer Coding

[David Farning]

It might me worth submitting a few of the SoaS relate GSOC projects to
Fedora Summer Coding. [1]

If any projects are accepted by FSC, it would leave more GCOS slots
open for non-SoaS projects.  FSC looks close enough to GSoC that the
additional overhead of working with both programs would be minimal.

david

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Summer_Coding_2010
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Re: [IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists

[David Farning]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Martin Langhoff  
wrote:

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Peter Robinson  wrote:

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:26 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:

The problem with this approach is that it renders SoaS ineffective for
new tryers of Sugar (i.e. the overwhelming majority of teachers and
parents we are trying to reach).


I don't think it will be any less ineffective than having 20
activities of which half have issues, crash or just don't run.


Are people saying _only 6 activities work reliably?_

My question of "which is it?" was assuming there are more than 6 that
run well, demo well, maintained, etc. So it meant "which plan is it, 6
activities that allow downloading and installing of more, or the good
ones?"

If there are only 6 good ones...  would focus on making that list longer.

Did APIs break with Sugar churn, Fedora churn? Developers upload
without testing? (Rethorical! Flamefest warning! Those questions are
bound to be a flamefest blaming people who don't deserve to be
blamed... :-( )


A big issue that we are have on the .deb side is the the distros are pushing 
ahead with new, faster, stronger While sugar has stabilized on a base.  The 
biggest issue for us is with xulrunner and browse.  Since mozilla has dropped 
support for xulrunner and xpcom in favor of web kit.  Ubuntu is not willing to 
carry it forward in the upcoming LTS release.

I don't know if one can properly assign blame.  It is more the nature of 
evolutionary software development.  Upstreams move forward while downstreams 
are more hesitant because they have significant investments and support cost to 
consider.

david


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
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Re: [IAEP] [SLOBS] non-free activities on ASLO

[David Farning]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Martin Langhoff  
wrote:

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:

Yes.  We ratified at a SLOBS meeting that non-free activities (or
content) should *not* be hosted on ASLO, and attempted to specify
what we mean by non-free:


I personally think it is very good that free are clearly separated
from non-free, and I think it's good strategically for all involved.

There is one aspect that will be tricky on the content side -- it is
very easy to create / release content that is in itself free, but
dependent on non-free software. Picture the well-meaning content
creator that releases a Flash interactive under a CC license (and it
uses fancy Flash10 things that are not in Gnash).

Educational content creators aren't as educated as FOSS programmers in
the vagaries and politics of patents, software licensing and all (they
are educated in other legalities, usually). We can't flame them for
being dumb, they are smart about a different set of things.

Much of their work will be what Debian would call "contrib" -- Free in
itself but depending on non-free bits.

While 'contrib' in Debian is usually not very big, if Sugar succeeds
attracting content creators, it might be a big category... at least
until the free tools mature, and the authors learn why it matters,
switch tools, etc.

It is a social process that will take a while -- I am sure there'll be
'contrib' stuff for quite a while, maybe forever.



So... what about "contrib"?



Martin articulated my views rather well.

I believe that Sugar Labs is an education project which uses open source 
development methodologies and licences because they are socially just and 
extremely cost effective at building the common platform.

The ecosystem to support and develop deployments is _as_ important as the 
platform itself.

As such, as part of my ongoing sugar ecosystem building efforts I have 
registered ACTIVIDADES.COM and will establish a marketplace for non-free 
activities.

I will continue all of my current technical ASLO support and development and 
will abstain from further policy discussion about what should be hosted on the 
Sugar Labs site.

david  


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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] [Sugar-devel] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[David Farning]

+1. Solutions Grovey has several moodle experts in house

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Bernie Innocenti  
wrote:
On Sat, 2010-02-27 at 15:34 +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
> we can move in several directions at the same time,
>
> * web hosting,
>   I'm more thinking about Moodle because hacking AMO will increase 
ASLO
>   patch which could be wrong way to go since we don't have PHP coders
>   involeved to ASLO coding

We already have a Moodle instance running here:

 http://schools.sugarlabs.org/

I don't know if anyone is using it, and it may very well be an updated
version at this time. Caroline could tell you more about it.

If you need a development Moodle installation, just let me know.


> * sugar UI,
>   we already have FileShare activity
>   I'm working on Library-2 activity which should support not only 
server
>   model but also per-to-peer sharing model (activity will have thumb
>   view to make object browsing more useful)

Very interesting...

--
  // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/




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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[David Farning]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Aleksey Lim wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:08:41PM -0600, David Farning wrote:
> > The other day during an infrastructure meeting, Walter brought up some
> > thought on how to enable kids to exchange Turtle Art projects
> >
> > Alsroot has been thinking about how to do this through a.sl.o since he
> > became the activities.sugarlabs.org code maintainer.
> >
> > The high level view is that someone can easily upload Turtle Art
> creations
> > to somewhere and then they, or others, can go to a portal to download
> other
> > Turtle Art creations.
> >
> > Client side, this would require:
> > 1. Adding a widget to either the journal or the TA activity to upload the
> TA
> > Bundle.
> > 2. Adding a TA bundle installer to handler TA Bundle downloads.
> >
> > Server side, this would require:
> > 1. A place to accept TA bundle uploads.
> > 2. A search-able place from which to download TA bundles
> >
> > We have some similar systems we can look to as examples.
> > 1. Scratch -- Scratch has an upload button and users can download scratch
> > projects from --  http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/newest
> > 2. ASLO --  Users upload XO bundles via a web interface and download via
> a
> > web interface.
> >
> > My initial instinct is to see if ASLO can be adopted to fit this need.
> > Primarily because we have it, it works, and it is scalable.  On the other
> > hand, if the only tool in one's toolbox is a hammer, everything looks
> like a
> > nail. (How is that for over using clichés and buzzword?)
> >
> > Considerations:
> > ASLO rocks:)
> > ASLO can be adapted to handle various file types.  For example:
> > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3
> > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2
> >
> > Each file type can have a separate look and feel.
> >
> > Is the activity creation and upload process too complicated for young
> users?
> >
> > Moving forward:
> > Would it be possible to journal or TA widget which:
> > 1.  Walks the student though a upload wizard.
> > 2.  Combines the TA project into a into a bundle with the metadata
> generated
> > in the wizard.
> > 3.  Sends the bundle to activites.sl.o/uploads
> >
> > Would it be possible to setup/adapt ASLO to:
> > 1. Handle TA files types.
> > 2. Accepts TA bundles+metadata uploads and inserts them into the review
> > queue.
>
> At the end there could problem, current AMO workflow stuck to web uploading
> UI
> only, so we'll have to get rid of uploaders UI and use only browsing part
> (thus will have to not trivial patching AMO).
>
> >
> > david
>
> there is also another way, implement it only in special activity
> http://idea.olpcorps.net/drupal5/ideatorrent/idea/19
>
> --
> Aleksey
>

I think we are talking about the same thing.  I don't know understand the
journal well enough to understand if it should be a separate activity,
widget in TA, or Widget in the Journal.  But a good starting point might be
a client side library (ALSO) activity which can push a bundle+meta data.  It
will be an easier task creating a separate activity and proving it works
rather than going straight to a journal feature.

>From a design point of view, I am thinking that the library would either
wrap a [XO|TA|Unified] bundle in (yet another) layer of meta data or the
current bundle could be extended to include the necessary library meta data.

Once the bundle arrives at the server, we could extend the existing bundle
checker to extract the new meta data and insert the bundle into ASLO.

This gives users the ability either use the web interface or library
activity.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[David Farning]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Walter Bender wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:08 PM, David Farning  wrote:
> > The other day during an infrastructure meeting, Walter brought up some
> > thought on how to enable kids to exchange Turtle Art projects
> >
> > Alsroot has been thinking about how to do this through a.sl.o since he
> > became the activities.sugarlabs.org code maintainer.
> >
> > The high level view is that someone can easily upload Turtle Art
> creations
> > to somewhere and then they, or others, can go to a portal to download
> other
> > Turtle Art creations.
> >
> > Client side, this would require:
> > 1. Adding a widget to either the journal or the TA activity to upload the
> TA
> > Bundle.
> > 2. Adding a TA bundle installer to handler TA Bundle downloads.
> >
> > Server side, this would require:
> > 1. A place to accept TA bundle uploads.
> > 2. A search-able place from which to download TA bundles
> >
> > We have some similar systems we can look to as examples.
> > 1. Scratch -- Scratch has an upload button and users can download scratch
> > projects from --  http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/newest
> > 2. ASLO --  Users upload XO bundles via a web interface and download via
> a
> > web interface.
> >
> > My initial instinct is to see if ASLO can be adopted to fit this need.
> > Primarily because we have it, it works, and it is scalable.  On the other
> > hand, if the only tool in one's toolbox is a hammer, everything looks
> like a
> > nail. (How is that for over using clichés and buzzword?)
> >
> > Considerations:
> > ASLO rocks:)
> > ASLO can be adapted to handle various file types.  For example:
> > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3
> > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2
> >
> > Each file type can have a separate look and feel.
> >
> > Is the activity creation and upload process too complicated for young
> users?
> >
> > Moving forward:
> > Would it be possible to journal or TA widget which:
> > 1.  Walks the student though a upload wizard.
> > 2.  Combines the TA project into a into a bundle with the metadata
> generated
> > in the wizard.
> > 3.  Sends the bundle to activites.sl.o/uploads
>
> I am not sure what you are asking? How is this different that just
> using Browse to upload files from the Journal?
>

IIRC, Uploading via the browser requires the uploader fill in several fields
on the server and provide a link to the file they want to upload.  This
results in a server driven workflow (pull).  I am thinking of a client
driven (push) use case where the client sends a bundle with the required
meta data to a URL.  From there, ALSO processes the bundle+metadate with out
further user intervention.  This requires a bit of client side prethinking:
1. Is the upload a registered ASLO user? If not, ask them to register.
2. Does the activity already exist and this is a new version? Ask one set of
question.
3. Is this a new activity? Ask a more involved set of questions.

My questions are:
1.Is this requiring 'too much' of a young user who just wants to upload a
project?
2. Are we trying to pound in a screw with a hammer?

David

I realize that I am obsessed with ASLO and tend to stretch it beyond its
usefulness

-walter
>
> > Would it be possible to setup/adapt ASLO to:
> > 1. Handle TA files types.
> > 2. Accepts TA bundles+metadata uploads and inserts them into the review
> > queue.
> >
> > david
> >
> > ___
> > Sugar-devel mailing list
> > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>
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[IAEP] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[David Farning]

The other day during an infrastructure meeting, Walter brought up some
thought on how to enable kids to exchange Turtle Art projects

Alsroot has been thinking about how to do this through a.sl.o since he
became the activities.sugarlabs.org code maintainer.

The high level view is that someone can easily upload Turtle Art creations
to somewhere and then they, or others, can go to a portal to download other
Turtle Art creations.

Client side, this would require:
1. Adding a widget to either the journal or the TA activity to upload the TA
Bundle.
2. Adding a TA bundle installer to handler TA Bundle downloads.

Server side, this would require:
1. A place to accept TA bundle uploads.
2. A search-able place from which to download TA bundles

We have some similar systems we can look to as examples.
1. Scratch -- Scratch has an upload button and users can download scratch
projects from --  http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/newest
2. ASLO --  Users upload XO bundles via a web interface and download via a
web interface.

My initial instinct is to see if ASLO can be adopted to fit this need.
Primarily because we have it, it works, and it is scalable.  On the other
hand, if the only tool in one's toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a
nail. (How is that for over using clichés and buzzword?)

Considerations:
ASLO rocks:)
ASLO can be adapted to handle various file types.  For example:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:3
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2

Each file type can have a separate look and feel.

Is the activity creation and upload process too complicated for young users?

Moving forward:
Would it be possible to journal or TA widget which:
1.  Walks the student though a upload wizard.
2.  Combines the TA project into a into a bundle with the metadata generated
in the wizard.
3.  Sends the bundle to activites.sl.o/uploads

Would it be possible to setup/adapt ASLO to:
1. Handle TA files types.
2. Accepts TA bundles+metadata uploads and inserts them into the review
queue.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Local Labs portlet in the main wiki?

[David Farning]

Would it be posible to add a local labs section to the media wiki sidebar?

david

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Frederick Grose wrote:

> The Sugar Labs wiki has a sidebar link in the Quick Links section for Local
> Labs that links to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Local_Labs.
>
> Those familiar with the Local Sugar Labs are encouraged to revise that
> page!
>
> --Fred
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero 
> Date: Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 12:15 AM
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] Local Labs portlet in the main wiki?
> To: Bernie Innocenti 
> Cc: IDavid Farning , Chris Leonard <
> cjlhomeaddr...@gmail.com>, Frederick Grose 
>
>
> This would be nice to make more visible all the Local Labs.
>
> I don't have the fu on this, help most welcome.
>
> Rafael Ortiz
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Bernie Innocenti 
> wrote:
> > It would be nice to add a new portlet to the main wiki to display all
> > available Local Labs.
> >
> > Can someone with the necessary Mediawiki-fu do this? The current Local
> > Labs are:
> >
> >  http://ar.sugarlabs.org/  (still working on it)
> >  http://co.sugarlabs.org/
> >  http://cl.sugarlabs.org/
> >  http://dc.sugarlabs.org/
> >  http://pe.sugarlabs.org/
> >
> > --
> >   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
> >  \X/  Sugar Labs   - http://sugarlabs.org/
> >
> > ___
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> >
>
>
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] ASLO bootcamp at RIT weekend of March 7 or 14

[David Farning]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 15:18 -0600, David Farning wrote:
> > I just wanted to poll the interest on these lists about an ASLO
> > bootcamp which we are planning for either the weekend of March 7 or 14
> > on the RIT campus.
> >
> > The format will be a series of 5 sessions on:
> >   * 1.1 Session 0 Systems
> >   * 1.2 Stage 1 Basic Web Site Technologies
> >   * 1.3 Stage 2 Caching
> >   * 1.4 Stage 3 Load balancing
> >   * 1.5 Stage 4 Reliability
> > Each session will be a three hour block consisting of:
> > 1h Theory - Lecture.
> > 1h Tutorial - structured exploration.
> > 1h Free exploration.
> >
> > To encourage wider participation, I hope to:
> > 1. Live stream and record the lectures.
> > 2. Encourage remote participation via IRC
> > 2. Make all tutorials and resources available on the Sugar Labs wiki.
> >
> > Please let me know if you are interested in participating in person,
> > remotely, or possible use the resources in the future.  The long term
> > goal is to create a bootcamp format where senior community members canng
> > effectively engage and share their knowledge and experience with new
> > community members.
>
> I wish I were there in person, but I'll try to participate from remote
> if we can get people to join IRC and redirect important communication
> through it.
>
> Very nice!

This brings us up to 6 in person and 6 remote!

I am working on the logistics of 5 three hour blocks each followed by a hour
meal break.  It will be a lot of work but it should be worth it.  The
lecture, tutorial, explore, break sequence should give us a nice rhythm that
will suit both in person and remote learning.  I am planning on giving the
lectures.  Dogi can run the tutorial sections.

I am particularly interested about how the free exploration hours will go.
The participants seem to have a wide variety of backgrounds and interest.
So, the exploration will take us in interest directions.  We have many more
details to work out.

It could be a total flop or it could be a home run.  But it seems worth the
risk.

david
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[IAEP] ASLO bootcamp at RIT weekend of March 7 or 14

[David Farning]

I just wanted to poll the interest on these lists about an ASLO bootcamp
which we are planning for either the weekend of March 7 or 14 on the RIT
campus.

The format will be a series of 5 sessions on:

   - 1.1 Session 0
Systems
   - 1.2 Stage 1 Basic Web Site
Technologies
   - 1.3 Stage 2
Caching
   - 1.4 Stage 3 Load
balancing
   - 1.5 Stage 4
Reliability

Each session will be a three hour block consisting of:
1h Theory - Lecture.
1h Tutorial - structured exploration.
1h Free exploration.

To encourage wider participation, I hope to:
1. Live stream and record the lectures.
2. Encourage remote participation via IRC
2. Make all tutorials and resources available on the Sugar Labs wiki.

Please let me know if you are interested in participating in person,
remotely, or possible use the resources in the future.  The long term goal
is to create a bootcamp format where senior community members can
effectively engage and share their knowledge and experience with new
community members.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Weekly Infrastructure Meeting Reminder

[David Farning]

Can we bump the wikimedia machine and aslo discussion to the top of
the meeting, so our friend from RIT don't need to wait for us to cover
the other issues.

The topic should be pretty short this week.  We are in a holding
pattern until the spring term at RIT starts.

In the meantime we will be adding a temporary web node at Gnaps to
handle the load until the cluster comes online.  That should be pretty
minor.

david

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Stefan Unterhauser
 wrote:
> Infrastructure meeting:
> Volunteer Infrastructure Gang, Sugarlabs Infrastructure Team
> and TreeHousers :)
>
> # Date: 2010-02-02
> # Time: 21:00 UTC (16:00 EST, 22:00 CET)
> # Agenda: http://etherpad.com/9LHNuaKPY2
> # Location: #treehouse on irc.oftc.net
> # or Link: http://embed.mibbit.com/?server=irc.oftc.net&channel=%23treehouse
>
> cu
> dogi
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Re: [IAEP] ubuntu-sugar-remix release.

[David Farning]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Sascha Silbe
 wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 01:38:46PM -0600, David Farning wrote:
>
>> I would like to encourage mentors to get involved in the project. Much
>> of our time and energy is spent getting students involved in the
>> project.  It would be great if a few people could step up and
>> volunteer as mentors for them.
>
> Can you elaborate on that, please? What do you expect from mentors and how
> would one volunteer? Would they earn some kind of sweat equity as well (like
> the students)? etc.

I am not good at hypotheticals, I tend to get carried away  Before
answering I thought we should establish a baseline case from which to
learn.

So, I am happy to announce that we have our first student-mentor pair
-- Alexander and Sascha!  The program will be closely based on GSOC --
no need to reinvent the wheel -- adapted for our needs.

"My hypothesis is that we can increase reliability and speed by getting
rid of the squashfs overlay by having the bootloader work with a
standard file system such as ext4 or btrfs.  Along the way, I would
like to learn about the pros and cons of single vs. dual file systems.
Can we reduce complexity and increase reliability by using
a single file system.  This includes the effect of multiple partitions
on solid state wear levelling. vs have the system stuff sit on a read
only partition and the userdata sitting on a read write
partition.  Basically taking hot-plug to its limit as students pull
out the sticks at random:("

The next step will be establishing feedback between Sascha and
Alexander to create a more formal project specification which takes
into account:

a) The experience and technical background of the Alexander and Sascha.
b) The time available to work on the project.

david

> CU Sascha
>
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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>
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[IAEP] ubuntu-sugar-remix release.

[David Farning]

I thought that I would send the week's summary to our friends
upstream.  IFF they feel it is useful, I would like to continue
sharing a weekly summary with them.  It is always good to hear how
people are using and building on your work.

Each week I try to send out a summary and status report including the
follow 5 areas:
--End Users--
--Developers--
--Community--
--Thanks--
--Call to Action--

This week Is going to be a little different. Progress on the remix was
a bust this week.  Not the usual hype you expect from someone trying
to start a new project.  But, your trust is the my primary concern at
this stage.

This week was mostly organisational stuff.  A lot of big decisions
about how to move forward needed attention.
1.  I am starting a company to provide support for Ubuntu-Sugar-Remix.
The (very tentative) name will be USER Linux for
User {Sugar, Squeak, Scratch} Educational Remix. (Caroline Meek's idea
adapted slightly for my needs:)  One must pay homage to the rich
tradition of recursive name.  It has been a tough decision and a
pretty big risk.  I now have to make a weekly payroll with no
immediate sign of income.

2.  The wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix got a revamp.
 I am pretty excited about
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix/Test . The plan is to adopt
the XO smoke test into a use case driven test suite.  Rather than
having customers think in terms of features and bug reports.  I would
like to think in term of uses and tests.  This gives two wins, teacher
and deployers think in terms of uses.  They want to _do_ something
with sugar.  And, the test suite will be great to verify what is works
and what does not work at any given time an various types of hardware.

4.  Worked with the Rochester Institute of Technology and Sugar Labs
to set up hosting for activities.sugarlabs.org at the University.  My
assumption as communicated on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSugarRemix/Roadmap is that content is
king.  Last January I had the chance to talk with Bryan Berry the CTO
of the OLE Nepal.  He expressed a thought that resonated with me.  The
XO and Sugar are cool technologies that people want.  Useful
activities are what will turn that want into a need.

3.  Worked with Sugar Labs to establish what we need to do to use the
trademarks owned by Sugar Labs.

4. Started formalising a business model and price structure.  I am
currently charging $40 per hour for my time working on deployment
issues.  I am encouraging organisations to 'pay' their tabs with work
sweat equity[1].  High school interns 'earn' $10 per hour for their
school.  College interns and work study students 'earn' $20 per hour.
My rational is threefold:
a. Create a transactional ecosystem to augment the reciprocity based
ecosystem of Sugar Labs.
b. Foster local pockets of Sugar expertise.
c. Encourage student involvement.  After all it's a learning project:)

The goal is to grow the ecosystem to the point where some
organisations are willing to pay cash so that we can hire developers
to expand the project.

== Call to action ==
I would like to encourage mentors to get involved in the project. Much
of our time and energy is spent getting students involved in the
project.  It would be great if a few people could step up and
volunteer as mentors for them.

As usual, the weekly release will be available by Sunday night.  For
the the lawyers out there, Sunday night mean 'before I go to sleep'.
If I am on Bernie time, Sunday night might actually fall on noon
Monday
david

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_equity
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[IAEP] Ubuntu Sugar Remix - Project update.

[David Farning]

Hey all,

I just wanted to give Sugar Labs an update on the progress of Ubuntu
Sugar Remix.

Since the beginning, I have advocated that Sugar Labs should be a
distribution and platform agnostic upstream which is the foundation
for the Sugar ecosystem.  Sugar Labs is doing that quite well.  The
next layer of the ecosystem is a service organisation which combines
Sugar, a Linux distribution, and a specific piece of hardware into a
supported product.  I have started Ubuntu Sugar Remix to be that
organisation.

Rather than being a community project, USR is a benevolent
dictatorship.  I make no apologies for that.

USR's business model is to meet the needs of specific customers who
insert value back into the USR ecosystem.  This brings two things to
Sugar Labs:

1.  Sugar Labs now has a tangible partner (if you chose to have one).
This will force Sugar Labs to solidify it's partner policies.

1a.  Trademarks are no longer an abstract issues.  Several weeks ago I
sent a post to SLOBs requesting permission to use the project name
Ubuntu Sugar Remix.  I indicated that I did not need an immediate
answer.  Now that the Sugar Labs trademarks issues seem to be settling
down, I will ask again for permission to call my project 'Ubuntu Sugar
Remix.'  The terms Ubuntu * Remix has a distinct definition within
Ubuntu and Canonical which implies a derivative which is base on
Ubuntu but does not receive official Canonical support.

1b. Use and conditions of the term 'Sugar Partner' will be to be
defined.  Cross marketing policies with need to be defined.

2.  As we fix and improve USR to meet our customers needs, those fixes
will be available to the larger Sugar Labs community.

david
Ubuntu Sugar Remix
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Re: [IAEP] Local Labs for Mexico

[David Farning]

Gabriel,

Would you please create a local lab proposal like the ones on
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Local_Labs .  From there we can start
figuring out how to proceed most effectively.

david

2009/11/17 Gabriel Molina :
> Hello!
>
> I'm very interested in Sugar Project and I'd like to know if there are
> people working to introduce this project in Mexico. If not, I'd like to
> start a Local Lab based on the experiencies of other latin american
> counties. For now I'm gathering information to know the situation of this
> project in my country.
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> ちりも積もれば山となる
>
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[IAEP] Looking for local labs.

[David Farning]

For the past year, I have been deliberately keeping Sugar Labs out of
the way of local labs to help insure that early local labs were not
over whelmed by the visions or personalities of Sugar Labs.  Browsing
the list lately, it looks like it might be time to take a shot at
collecting ideas from existing local labs so we can share them with
the world.

In particular, http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Local_Labs is really out
of date.  I would appreciate it if anyone knows of a local lab they
could add it to that page or send a quick reply to this this so I can
add it.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Local Labs for Mexico

[David Farning]

Let's get started.  It looks like there is a strong grass root
interest.  Lets use this mailing list until we need a new one.

The first question is would would we like to accomplish?
1. Support one or more deployments.
2. Spreading the word.
3. Localisation.
4. Develop technical or educational content.

What are some or the various project going on in Mexico?

david


2009/12/3 Asaf Paris Mandoki :
> I'm in Mexico and would be interested in collaborating to start the local lab.
>
> Saludos,
> Asaf
>
> 2009/11/18 Gabriel Molina :
>> Hello!
>>
>> I'm very interested in Sugar Project and I'd like to know if there are
>> people working to introduce this project in Mexico. If not, I'd like to
>> start a Local Lab based on the experiencies of other latin american
>> counties. Bynow I'm gathering information about the status of this project
>> in Mexico.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> --
>> ちりも積もれば山となる
>>
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[IAEP] The sugar stack

[David Farning]

It seems time to think about the next _big_ technical issue for
growing Sugar Labs.  Clearly articulating the Sugar Stack.  For the
last year or so, we have been circling the issue with talk of stable
APIs, Glucose, Fructose, and expected dependencies.

Last year, we created the release cycle.  At first, _everyone_
disagreed with the idea; Release cycles are perfect for _no_one_.
Defining the Sugar Stack is going to be nearly as painful, because the
'stack definition' is not going to be perfect for anyone.

Some reasons for defining a stack:
1. Statement of quality.  One of the most frequently cited reasons for
the glucose, fructose, honey classification is quality.
- Glucose is the core stuff.
- Fructose is the supported stuff.
- Honey is the rest.
This is a very valid method of defining layers of the project; Fedora
had core and extras, Ubuntu has main and universe, Eclipse has various
levels of official-ness, (none of which I can remember) The kernel
simply has 'in-tree' and 'out-of-tree'.

2. Statement of synchronisation.  In some instances it is desirable
for various parts of a project to be tested and release together.
- Sugar core is developed according to a release cycle.
- Fructose tends to align with the release cycle.
- Honey happens 'when it happens.'
This is also very valid; Distro all have synchronised releases.  The
desktop managers all ship a core at distinct release points.  Ecplise
has its release train.

3. Statement of what is provided.  Down streams _need_ to know what
applications they can depend on.
- Core APIs
- Optional things to meet dependencies.
Most languages provide for core functionality which can be extended
with modules.  Apache also is organized as http server and installable
modules.

Many of the discussion about this have stalled because of confusion
over what aspect the stack we are trying to define.

 As a starting point, I would suggest:
1. That we get rid of the glucose - fructose categorisation.  It is
overloaded and confusing
2. That Quality and synchronisation of activities becomes an
Activities Team issue.

This shifts the discussion back to the hard problem of how to think
terms of 'Sugar-Space' and 'Activities-Space'.

Long term projects success depends on external organisation knowing
what they can depend on to be part of Sugar.

Before starting a holy war  The process of articulating the Sugar
stack, much the the release cycle, is an evolutionary process.  There
is no way the anyone could sit down and declare, 'This is what Sugar
consists of... and will consist of in the future.'

Instead, the stack is a snapshot of agreed upon APIs, libraries, and
applications on which downstream activities developers can depend.  I
suggest that:
1. The development team and activities team work together to start
defining the boundary between core and activities.
2. All changes to the core and activities boundary should go through
the new features (or similar) process.

After a few iterations, this process will become as second nature as
the release process.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2009-11-16

[David Farning]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Walter Bender  wrote:
> === Sugar Digest ===
>
> 1. I am writing this update today while waiting to see if I will
> called to jury duty. I was originally supposed to report last week,
> but a deferment was granted since I was in Bolzano. I am not sure why
> I had never been called before—both my wife and children have served
> several times. But unlike the airport in Rome, there is at least a
> place to sit and plug in my laptop and get on-line while I wait, so
> here it goes.

I had noticed that there was very little traffic on the lists and IRC
about SugarCamp Bolzano.  As Walter points out, we got a tremendous
amount done,  but very little of it worthy of headlines.  My kind of
Meeting!

A very interesting dynamic was that almost _no_ time was spent talking
about what Sugar Labs _should_ do.  Rather it was a chance to work on
all of the nagging issues that are hard to get started on when your
primary resources are IRC, mailing lists, and google.

Kudos to Simon for a very well organised week.  My only gripe was the
lack of sound absorption material on the walls.  Dogi has a very low
pitch to his voice.  It was sometime hard for me to hear him when
there were other discussions happening in different parts of the room.
 As far as gripes go it is not a very serious one:)

As for me, I am enjoying one last morning watching the sun rise over
the mountains before it is time to head home.

Thanks for a good week.

david

> I was in Rome overnight in transit from Bolzano, where we held a
> week-long Sugar Camp
> [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009].
> Bolzano is in South Tyrol, in the Italian Alps. The autonomous
> regional government is a user of free software and is exploring ways
> in which they can engage the FOSS community more deeply. They have a
> regional development organization, TIS [http://www.tis.bz.it/], that
> fosters FOSS projects in the region, provides infrastructure and
> support, and an annual Free Software Week. It was in the context of
> [http://www.freesoftwareweek.org/ Free Software Week] that we came to
> Bolzano.
>
> Rather than meet at TIS, we (Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Dave
> Farning, Sean Daly, Stefan Unterhauser (Dogi), Carlo Falciola, Adam
> Holt, Christian Vanizette, and I) spent the week at
> [http://www.cts-einaudi.it/ CTS Luigi Einaudi], a technical school a
> short walk from the city center. We were given a comfortable room with
> Internet access, just upstairs from the school's coffee bar and next
> door to where the [http://live.gnome.org/ZeitgeistHackFest2009 Gnome
> Zeitgeist team] was meeting. Over the course of the week, we
> interacted with teachers, students, developers, and a variety of
> people in the region who have an interest in Sugar.
>
> We had a busy week. My typical day was to get up at 6:00, go down
> stairs for an early breakfast with David, who would have already been
> up for at least an hour, take a 20-minute walk to the school, arriving
> at 8:00, in time for the first espresso of the day. We'd write code,
> discuss ideas, brainstorm, and write more code until 20:00, at which
> point we'd make a plan for dinner—usually a pizza or some knudel and
> the local weizenbier or a glass of lagrein. Somehow or other, we would
> never manage to get back to the hostel until after midnight. Pizza,
> Python, and friends, surrounded by the Dolomites—not a bad way to
> spend the week.
>
> We made progress on the roadmap for 0.88, having brainstormed on a
> number of topics
> [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Ideas_0.88_0.90.pdf]. The themes
> that rose to the top were: a simplified collaboration model;
> resolution of some outstanding issues regarding the Home View, e.g.,
> how to best launch new verses resume activities; and some changes to
> the Journal—possibly the incorporation of versions and a better
> integration of the Journal into the activity workflow, e.g., making it
> possible to modify the description field while the activity is open.
> Other themes include accessibility and testing.
>
> Simon organized the discussions through the week. He kept us focused
> and productive. He also got some hacking in, spending time working
> through many of the issues associated with providing global support
> for spell-check. In doing this, he'll have laid out the framework for
> providing other global services.
>
> Tomeu spend most of his week being interrupted by people asking him
> questions. (Five minutes of Tomeu time usually was enough to keep me
> busy for a few hours.) But he did manage to make progress on his work
> on Python introspection. This work will lead to a much more efficient
> use of Python modules in Sugar.
>
> David and Dogi (working with Bernie and Aleksey from afar) did an
> overhaul of some of our back-end systems, which had been becoming
> stressed as more and more people are using Sugar. (For example, we've
> already surpassed 1.5-million downloads from activities.suga

Re: [IAEP] OOo4Kids available for Sugar!

[David Farning]

The relevant information is on the wiki is at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library .

Uploading specific information is at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Authors

Please note, I wrote those processes before anyone besides me had
actually uploaded an activity:(  I am not sure how close they match
the reality of current activities policy and procedures.

david

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
> believe me, there is no shortage of things I "should" know ;-)
>
> IRC not possible for me right now, but the marketing guy thinks he
> could work on a link on the homepage of a.sl.o explaining to any
> potential Activity developer (myself included) how to do it
>
> Sean
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:16 AM, David Farning  
> wrote:
>> The basics of uploading to activities.sl.o sounds like something the
>> marketing guy should know:)
>>
>> I am on IRC so I can walk you through the process.  (you can
>> upload it and then I will assign eric as author/developer so he owns
>> and maintains the project)
>>
>> david
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
>>> http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/2009/11/ooo4kidsactivityxo-is-available.html
>>>
>>> Eric has announced availability of the Sugar port of OOo4Kids.
>>>
>>> I haven't had the chance to test it yet.
>>>
>>> What's the procedure to add an Activity to activities.sugarlabs.org?
>>> So we can ask Eric to do that.
>>>
>>> thanks
>>>
>>> Sean
>>> ___
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>>>
>>
>
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Re: [IAEP] OOo4Kids available for Sugar!

[David Farning]

The basics of uploading to activities.sl.o sounds like something the
marketing guy should know:)

I am on IRC so I can walk you through the process.  (you can
upload it and then I will assign eric as author/developer so he owns
and maintains the project)

david

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Sean DALY  wrote:
> http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/2009/11/ooo4kidsactivityxo-is-available.html
>
> Eric has announced availability of the Sugar port of OOo4Kids.
>
> I haven't had the chance to test it yet.
>
> What's the procedure to add an Activity to activities.sugarlabs.org?
> So we can ask Eric to do that.
>
> thanks
>
> Sean
> ___
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>
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[IAEP] Mirrors in Argentina and Paraguay

[David Farning]

A quick thanks to the local labs in Argentina and Paraguary.  They
have set up mirrors to help distribute Sugar Labs content.

Their status will be updated on mirrors.sugarlabs.org next time page is updated.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] Sharing Google Apps calendars

[David Farning]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 12:02 AM, Bernie Innocenti  wrote:
> Personal and team calendars hosted at our Google Apps instance can now
> be shared with anyone outside the @sugarlabs.org domain also in
> read-only and read-write mode.

Cool, I don't think this was possible when we first set up the calendars.

> The default policy for Google Apps was to restrict sharing with the
> outside world to free/busy mode.
>
> If there's user demand for it, we could install a DAViCal server on
> Sunjammer.
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
> ___
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> syst...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/systems
>
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Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.

[David Farning]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 01:02, David Farning  wrote:
>> After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and
>> some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu
>> 9.10.
>
> Just gave them a try and worked great, congrats all! Which are the next steps?

Cool

The next steps are a proper bug tracker and start patching.  It has
been a little frustrating because all of the bugs on this thread have
been part of the lower packages.  As part of my learning I have been
starting with the easiest packages first, the activities.  From there
I hope to move to the more complicated core sugar packages and finally
start on xulrunner an csound.

The basic strategy is to move towards Debian's upstream packages.  The
goal is to allow Ubuntu and Debian to share patches and feedback
without step on each others toes with regard to packaging methods.
Debian has added several interesting features to automate the
packaging process.  But, these features make it harder for new
packagers to get started.

> Btw, why did we needed to build our own xulrunner?

The xpcom provided by the Ubuntu xulrunner does not seem to work correctly.

david

> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> For now, these packages are available on the Ubuntu-Sugarteam PPA
>> (personal package archive) at
>> https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive/0.86 .
>>
>> To use these packages, just add
>> 'http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/0.86/ubuntu karmic main' to the
>> end of /etc/apt/sources.list
>>
>> Ubuntu-Sugarteam
>>
>> --
>> Ubuntu-sugarteam mailing list
>> ubuntu-sugart...@lists.ubuntu.com
>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: 
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-sugarteam
>>
>
>
>
> --
> «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar.
> What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David
> Farning
>
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Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02

[David Farning]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Sameer Verma  wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:41 AM, David Farning  wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender  
>> wrote:
>>> I think there are more "recommended" activities than fit at any one
>>> time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is
>>> compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a
>>> recommended activity. I'll double-check.
>>
>> Currently there is not a formal "recommended" policy.  Basically,
>> whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and
>> remove an activity that has been around for awhile.  I think Aleksey
>> does the same.
>>
>> If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal "recommended"
>> list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for
>> them.
>>
>> david
>>
>
> I had written about this a long time ago. My approach was to rank
> activities based on a list of attributes (weighted scoring). The
> activities with the highest attributes would be the ones installed.
> The same approach could be used for "Recommended" activities. The
> thread is at 
> http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/2008-September/000707.html
> . The GoogleDocs spreadsheet is at
> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p_Xhb6KcXLyEViA50CnCaDg&hl=en

If you are interested, the job of recommend list[1] maintainer is
open.  ASLO is getting 100,000 visits a month, doubling every three
months, so the effect of your work would be rather widespread.

david

1. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/recommended

> Sameer
>
>>> -walter
>>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg  
>>> wrote:
>>>> Walter Bender wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David
>>>>> Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line
>>>>> over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with
>>>>> Mozilla copy
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen.
>>>> What does it require from an activity to be "recommended"?
>>>> My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there.
>>>> So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a
>>>> recommended activity?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Rita
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>>
>>>> Rita Freudenberg
>>>> Squeakland Foundation
>>>> http://www.squeakland.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Walter Bender
>>> Sugar Labs
>>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>>> ___
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>>> IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>>
>> ___
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>> IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
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[IAEP] Infrastructure Status Report

[David Farning]

While SoaS and Trademarks have gotten most of the attention lately,
other parts of Sugar Labs are growing and moving forward.   A lot is
happening on the infrastructure side of the project.  Some of it
behind the scenes and some of it more public.

--Capacity growth--
The biggest challenge faced by the team is handling capacity growth.

-Machines-
The first and most visible need is additional servers. Initially we
outsourced several of our services.  While cost effective, that policy
created problems because each place we outsourced to had different
support policies and system requirements.

Now we are going through a consolidating phase.  It is much easier to
maintain a consistent infrastructure.  Several of our services now
need to be clustered across groups of co-located machines for load
balancing and increasing reliability.

We are also seeing growth rate which are doubling every quarter for
Activities.sl.o.

-Administrators-
The second and less visible need is for administrators to help keep
the systems alive.  Sorry Bernie, we are going to have to pull you
(kicking and screaming) from sysadmin to Infrastructure team leader.
We are going to need to work on training and identify others so that
they can take authority and responsibility of parts of the
infrastructure.

--Specific Tasks--
There are a number of specific tasks in progress which need help.

-Launch Pad-
Luke is working on migrating pieces of the Infrastructure to Launch
Pad.  There are a number of Pros and Cons to this.

The big win will be using the LB bug tracker.  Upstream trac (our
current bug tracker) development has stalled make it very difficult to
maintain dev.sl.o.  Other improvements will be LP answers and LP
blueprints.  The user facing portion of LP is very good.

Overall the LP team has been very good to work with. But I still have
a number of reservations that I hope Luke and the LP team can take
care of:
1.  Integration with the rest of Sugar Labs services.  Specificly
git.sl.org and translate.sl.org.
2.  Ability not to get lost in Ubuntu.  There are several place where
it is very easy to unwittingly exit the Sugar project and end up
wandering around Ubuntu.
3.  Ability to get easily get back to the rest of the *sl.org

I encourage others to get involved in this project to insure that:
1. It is the right thing to do.
2. Work with the Sugar and LP communities to insure that this process
is beneficial to both parties.
3. Work with the Sugar user and developer communities to insure that
the migration goes smoothly.

-Activities.sl.org-
I am working on separating activities.sl.o from the rest of the Sugar
Labs services.

 There are several reasons for separating out a.sl.o:
1.  It will be easier to grant admin authority to a.sl.o with granting
admin authority to all of the SL infrastructure.
2.  A.sl.o is a resource hog.  By splitting it out, we can think about
scaling a.sl.o without worrying about how it will affect the rest of
the infrastructure.
3.  Security. The separation with provide a fence between a.sl.o and
the rest of the infrastructure.  If one part is compromised it will
not affect the other parts.

If any one want to help out,  there are several interesting tasks...
1. Setting up a fresh instance of a.sl.o.
2. Load balancing and HA for the php front end.
3. Load balancing and HA for the my SQL database.

-Beamrider-
Bernie is in the process of splitting up the services on sunjammer
between two machines, it and Beamrider.  This is primarily lead by the
needs to:
1.  Scale sunjammer.  In addition to SL stuff, Sunjammer is also
hosting services for local labs and OLE.
2.  Increase security and reliability.  Sunjammer will remain the
'developer' machine, hosting developer accounts and testing/devel
services, while beamrider will host higher priorith services.

-Machines and Rack space-
Finally, we need to start thinking about future machine and rack space
needs.  Of particular concern is finding a hosting provider that is
willing and able to our growing number of machines in a single
facility.

david
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Re: [IAEP] Fwd: Sugar Digest 2009-11-02

[David Farning]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Walter Bender  wrote:
> I think there are more "recommended" activities than fit at any one
> time. They are chosen randomly from the list. As to how the list is
> compiled, I do not know, but I believe that Etoys is already a
> recommended activity. I'll double-check.

Currently there is not a formal "recommended" policy.  Basically,
whenever I see a cool new activity I add it to the recommend list and
remove an activity that has been around for awhile.  I think Aleksey
does the same.

If anyone would like to create and maintain more formal "recommended"
list it is very easy to create an activities.sl.o editor's account for
them.

david

> -walter
>
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg  wrote:
>> Walter Bender wrote:
>>>
>>> 5. Thanks to the efforts of Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David
>>> Farning, the new http://activities.sugarlabs.org site went on-line
>>> over the weekend. The new look is clean and also in compliance with
>>> Mozilla copy
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I would like to know how the activities on the starting page are chosen.
>> What does it require from an activity to be "recommended"?
>> My question is not just out of curiosity, I would like to see Etoys there.
>> So I would like to know if we could do anything to be considered a
>> recommended activity?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Rita
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Rita Freudenberg
>> Squeakland Foundation
>> http://www.squeakland.org
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
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Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.

[David Farning]

Thanks for the bug report.

I pushed a new copy xulrunner.  It has been accepted but it is
going to wait in the build queue for about 18 hours before in makes it
to https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive/0.86 .

Sorry about that.  I didn't expect anyone to blog about the repo yet.
I'll make a new ~sugarteam/+archive/0.86-testing for testing our
packages and leave ~sugarteam/+archive/0.86 for stabler public stuff.

david

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Sameer Verma  wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:50 PM, David Farning  wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:29 AM,   wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>> After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and
>>>> some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu
>>>> 9.10.
>>>
>>> Thank you for your work. After some testing, I wrote a small blog-entry with
>>> some screenshots on OLPC France's blog, here:
>>>
>>> http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/10/un-cartable-numerique-pur-sucre/
>>>
>>> The Ubuntu variant used ist UNR 9.10.
>>>
>> Thanks Samy,
>> We have been struggling on the Ubuntu side of the project for awhile.
>>
>> A couple of people have already expressed interest in helping out!  I
>> am hoping that the Ubuntu-SugarTeam can holding some informal
>> packaging Sugar for Ubuntu classes next week.  As a project Ubuntu has
>> a lot (too much) packaging information available.  If we can sort out
>> the important stuff, it shouldn't take too long to get some more
>> packagers on board.
>>
>> david
>> ___
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>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
> Trying to install sugar-platform in Ubuntu 9.10 leads to  a dependency 
> problem.
>
> sudo apt-get install sugar-platform
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
> requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
> distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
> or been moved out of Incoming.
> The following information may help to resolve the situation:
>
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>  sugar-platform: Depends: sugar-fructose (>= 0.86.2) but it is not
> going to be installed
> E: Broken packages
>
>
> Sameer
>
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Re: [IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.

[David Farning]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 6:29 AM,   wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and
>> some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu
>> 9.10.
>
> Thank you for your work. After some testing, I wrote a small blog-entry with
> some screenshots on OLPC France's blog, here:
>
> http://olpc-france.org/blog/2009/10/un-cartable-numerique-pur-sucre/
>
> The Ubuntu variant used ist UNR 9.10.
>
Thanks Samy,
We have been struggling on the Ubuntu side of the project for awhile.

A couple of people have already expressed interest in helping out!  I
am hoping that the Ubuntu-SugarTeam can holding some informal
packaging Sugar for Ubuntu classes next week.  As a project Ubuntu has
a lot (too much) packaging information available.  If we can sort out
the important stuff, it shouldn't take too long to get some more
packagers on board.

david
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Re: [IAEP] ASLO testing

[David Farning]

2009/10/26 Rubén Rodríguez Pérez :
>
>> If you have a minute please test:
>>
>> http://activities-testing.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/
>
> It's the first time I come into this page, and it looks very cool!
>
> I have two complains though: the color scheme looks nice, but the
> contrast level (mostly the light blue text) seems a little low to me:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#style-color-contrast
>
> But more important, some activity descriptions have no license info.
> Showing that every activity is free software is an important issue and
> should be enforced. This is a problem in the current ASLO site too.

Setting the proper licensing is something which should be set by the
activity developer before uploading and verified by the editor before
making the activity publicly available.  If you see one missing, would
you file a bug against the activity, ping the author, or let us know
via this list.

Better yet, we could use someone to keep on eye on licensing in general:)

david
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[IAEP] 'apt-get install sugar-platform' available for Ubuntu9.10.

[David Farning]

After a couple of weeks of reading tutorials, help from Aleksey, and
some Ubuntu developers there are Sugar packages available for Ubuntu
9.10.

For now, these packages are available on the Ubuntu-Sugarteam PPA
(personal package archive) at
https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive/0.86 .

To use these packages, just add
'http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/0.86/ubuntu karmic main' to the
end of /etc/apt/sources.list

Ubuntu-Sugarteam
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Re: [IAEP] thin clients

[David Farning]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Deborah Boatwright
 wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am intrigued by many aspects of Sugar on a Stick.  My school uses Novell 
> with Windows XP on the desk top.
>
> Then I have a thin client network using LTSP-KIWI Opensuse that does not work 
> well. It is two servers and 72 thin clients.
>
>  I have a mobile laptop lab of 24 PC that are R30 thinkpads.
>
> My question is I found this site and wondered if I can use Sugar as an 
> application on my thin clients.
>
> http://en.opensuse.org/Sugar

Short answer is yes you can.

Longer answer it might take some work.  From what I have seen,
OpenSuse is the current leader in education solutions base on thin
clients.

I am ccing David Van Assche, the opensuse package maintainer.  He will
be most knowledgeable about (or can refer you to knowledgeable people)
deploying Sugar on OpenSuse in a thin client environment.

david

> The district has said it is switching to linux 100% and will use a windows 
> application server to deliver apps that are necessary otherwise.
>
> Sincere Regards,
> Deb
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Re: [IAEP] We want to create our local Sugar Labs Argentina.-

[David Farning]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Gustavo Ibarra  wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:18 AM, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero
>  wrote:
>>
>> Hello Gustavo.
>> Glad to have you here.
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Edward Cherlin 
>> wrote:
>> > Please copy to argent...@lists.laptop.org. I am not subscribed to it
>> > because, unfortunately, I do not speak or write Spanish.
>
>
>>
>> > Welcome/Bienvenido.
>
> Hola amigos!
>
> First of all, thank you for the welcome.
>
Hey Gustavo,

A Local Lab in Argentina is great!

We have found that Local Labs are incredibly helpful to the community
at large.  Usually, I try to help labs get set up. But now, I would
like to stay out of the picture.  There are some really great Local
Labs that are doing amazing this.

The true value of a Local Lab is building on top of Sugar to solve
your _local_ needs.  So, would you mind working with Rafael and other
existing local labs to set up SLA.  The big thing is that you do what
is best for Argentina.

Most of the stuff we have in the wiki about local lab is based on
conversations I have had with Jono Bacon.  This means that the
policies and procedures are based on _my_ interruption of how to apply
best practices from Ubuntu Locos to Sugar Labs.  While that was enough
to get started,  now that there are a couple of healthy labs around
the world it is best that the local labs to work together and share
internal best practices with each other.  After about 5 more local
labs are in place, I would like to help start compiling a list of best
practices on wiki.sl.o.

david

 >  Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>>
>> > I have just started organizing online meetings on the collaboration
>> > features of Sugar and the XO. Any interested teachers are welcome to
>> > join us for testing and tutorial sessions. We also need questions from
>> > teachers and students on anything that has puzzled them, and
>> > volunteers to translate the materials we create to Spanish and other
>> > languages.
>> > Our joint sessions will use Sugar on a Stick, which is set up to use a
>> > particular Jabber server. At some point we will provide instructions
>> > for connecting to that server from other forms of Sugar. They may very
>> > well be in the Wiki, but I haven't looked.
>>
>
> Edward,  i am sending this email with copy to argent...@lists.laptop.org
>
>  Gustavo Ibarra  wrote:
>>
>> >> We ask permission to create our local Sugar Lab for Argentina, as
>> >> members of
>> >> the Sugar Labs community, accepting and respecting MEMORANDUM OF
>> >> UNDERSTANDING
>> >> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployment_Team/Local_Lab_MOU and
>> >> the appropiate use of the LOGO
>> >> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Logo#Logo_usage
>>
>
> Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero  wrote:
>>
>> Local labs efforts must ask permission primary form it's own local
>> communities, for the overall community we ask to follow the rules of
>> distribution and participation already concerted with the overall
>> community, like the MOU f.e... i also recommend you to see SL
>> governance and SL .co governance to have ideas about to organize
>> participation.
>
> I'd like to make one clarification
> We are thinking to start with SLA in an informal way. We believe it is not
> necessary to be formal in order to the kind of work we are doing. And we
> would create a non profit foundation when it be necessary.
> --
> Saludos,
> Gustavo.-
>
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] ASLO updates

[David Farning]

I'll try to document how mirror brain is setup and how it affects
other systems in the wiki this afternoon.

Changes to devel, testing, or product activities.sl.o should not
affect one another.  They are three separate instances consisting of:
1. Separate code trees.
2. Separate database instances.
3. Separate file storage.

Two variations of the file tree are stored.  These trees are (I am
using mozilla terminology for the trees):
1. Application tree.
2. Repo tree.

Each instance has an individual application tree stored at
www-sugarlabs/activitie-*/files.  Each instance interact directly with
its application tree.  From a user pov this tree is call the sand box.

Each instance can have an _optional_ repo tree.  An instance interacts
with its repo tree via the 'download server.'   From a a user pov this
tree is the set of downloadable files.

Our confusion was because we were pointing the download server at the
application tree via a symlink.  When the download server was the same
machine as the application server it worked correctly.  Adding
mirrorbrain forced us to clearly draw the line between the download
server and the application server. Long term, it is good system
design.  Short term, a bug in mirrorbrain cause it to incorrectly
handle symlinks in the vhost directory part.

Moving forward--
1. Work Flow -- What ever you decide for a work flow is fine.
2. A.sl.o modularization -- a.slo is design to split up into several
pieces as it grows:
2.1 Application server. This is the primary php application.  It can
be split across multiple machines using mod_perbal.
2.2 Database server. This is the primary database.  It can be split
across multiple machines as necessary.  There are limited to
scalability due to db replication issues.
2.3 Download server.  This is the primary download server.  It can be
scaled using various CDN techniques.
2.4 Memcache server.  Memcach sits between the application server and
the database.  Memcache reduces database server load and is easier to
scale than multiple database server.

Currently, all of these pieces are sitting on sumjammer. As a result
we were a bit hand wavy about the abstraction barriers between the
pieces.

Due to the improvements bernie and danny have done to sunjammer we are
maxing out at 45% cpu usage.

Due to mirror brain we have reduced our the bandwith usage on
Sunjammer from between 100 and 150 GB per day to less than five GB.
The big gain is that offloading the downloads reduces the cache churn
and eth0 interupts on Sunjammer.

Recommended growth roadmap--
Based on discussions with the AMO infrastructure team the recommend
plans for grow are:
1. Split off download server.  We have effectively done that via
mirrorbrain.  But at some point we will need to see about putting
mirrorbrain on a separate machine.
2. Split off download server.  At some point, we will need to put the
database on a separate machine which will grow into cluster of
machines.
3. Split off memcache server.  At some point we will need to split off
memcache machines.  Memcache machines can just be a bunch of old
machines with lots of memory.
4. Build multiple application servers.  This is just a matter of using
mod_perlbal to distribute across multiple servers.

I have no idea when we are going to have to make the above changes.
Current growth trajectory for a.sl.o is about 25% per months.  But,
this could change when:
1. SoaS buleberry comes out.
2. Sugar .86 starts to hit the street and the updater starts
automatically pinging a.sl.o for updates.

I do want to make sure that ever though a.slo. _looks_ like a black
box, scaling a.sl.o is a solved problem.

Hope this helps.
david

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Aleksey Lim  wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 07:34:50AM +, Aleksey Lim wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 02:42:15AM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>> > [cc += dfarning, alsroot, syst...@]
>> >
>> > El Wed, 14-10-2009 a las 17:47 -0700, Josh Williams escribió:
>> > > I've made some bug fixes to the new ASLO design, I've tested it lightly
>> > > and it seems to work in all major browsers (even ie6). If you have a few
>> > > moments, please test it out (download/upload activities, browse around)
>> > > and let me know if you see any display bugs or major usability issues.
>> > >
>> > > http://activities-devel.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/
>> >
>> > All links to activity bundles appear to be broken :-(
>> > For example:
>> >
>> >  http://activities-devel.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/downloads/file/26072/xpi/labyrinth-7.xo?src=addondetail
>> >
>> > I'm not sure how to fix it, but I can imagine that it may be related
>> > with moving the activity bundles from their old location
>> > (/srv/www-sugarlabs/activities/files) to the upload directory
>> > (/srv/upload/activities/) done by Dfarning in order to enable
>> > Mirrorbrain.
>> >
>> > Earlier today, alsroot asked me to fix some permission issues that would
>> > prevent aslo from writing new activities in the new location.
>>
>> T

[IAEP] Slobs election results 2009

[David Farning]

The results are in for this years election.  The winners are in for
this years election.

Walter Bender
Tomeu Vizoso
Mel Chua
Bernie Innocenti
Chris Ball
Sean Daly
Adam Holt

David Farning
Slobs Election Referee 2009
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Re: [IAEP] Montessori madness...

[David Farning]

Stephen Jacobs (cced) the Professor of the OLPC/Sugar course at the
Rochester institute of Technology is a product of Montessori schools.
His mother was a Montessori teacher.

I have found it helpful to include him in Montessori related
discussion.  He has a good sense of what happens 'in the classroom' in
addition to a theoretical understanding of Montessori.

david

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Yama Ploskonka  wrote:
> Montessori, and all of Experiential Education, rely so very much on the
> personality of the teacher that they have very limited scalability.  This
> single matter is a whole sub-science in itself, with scant actual work
> beyond the empirical.
>
> Because some Schools of Montessori (there are factions and cults as anywhere
> else) are even more rigid than others (I was blessed to have my 1 1/2 year
> as Montessori teacher assistant happen in a more open one),  the tendency to
> fall into rigid Walls you mention is way too common. I was warned of that as
> I was considering specialized formal training. Even CUT had a Montessori...
> I don't know if it was you who mentioned some Montessori did not want to
> even consider XOs.
>
> As to the spark in their eyes, yes, certainly.  One problem we have is that
> right now the learning curve for getting the XO/Sugar to be useful for them
> is so steep that it's unlikely they will get there.
>
> BTW, the reports from Arahuay indicate that there they let the canes be
> handled by trusty older kids, ingenious way to avoid setting themselves to
> charges of abuse.
>
> a last BTW, and I should be getting to work, my nephews 3 and 1 1-2 years
> old at the time got the time of their lives with Lion King Activities, a
> most excellent set of learning and exploring software from back then,
> apparently able to navigate around "by themselves" on a PC.  Of course,
> uncle was by, so as was mentioned earlier, that made the
> self-learning-computer somewhat redundant and unworthy as a datapoint,
> something I do earnestly agree.
>
> That is why, again, I ask for ways we could find to communicate with real
> teachers right there on the ground.
>
> And a final BTW, Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources deserves a
> look
>  http://river-rv.blogspot.com/
> They seem to be managing to do education under very difficult circumstances,
> somewhat similar to what Sameer describes as happening in Bhagmalpur, and a
> good point is to enhance peer-supported learning
>
> I quote "For millions of children in the under-privileged sections of rural
> communities, RIVER has created, tested, successfully implemented and
> replicated, in India and abroad, a path-breaking Multi-Grade, Multi-Level
> (MGML) Methodology in Primary Education. Around 75,000 teachers and
> 67,50,000 children are being benefited by this unique system based on
> activity based learning. Unlike the glaring drawbacks existing in the
> prevalent, mono-grade, teacher directed, text book based teaching system,
> the MGML methodology has started a silent revolution that makes learning
> joyful, reduces student dropouts, enhances community school linkage and
> makes the teacher more accountable. "
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Sameer Verma  wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Martin Langhoff
>>  wrote:
>> > On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Sameer Verma  wrote:
>> >> I've been reading "Montessori Madness" for a few hours now, and I find
>>
>> > Of course, I like most of Montessori's approach. But remove the human
>> > elements and... poof! it's effects will be gone. Montessori strategies
>> > in a crowded group with an unenthusiastic teacher have very slim
>> > chances.
>> >
>>
>> Indeed. My kid goes to a Montessori (which is why I was reading this
>> book) but we've seen several M schools around here, where an
>> indifferent teacher destroys the environment. It reverts to a Pink
>> Floyd'ish assembly-line of faceless students processed into pink
>> filler meat (Cue 4:21 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VUhoD3vM9Q).
>> Interestingly, my current discussions with them are about the
>> introduction of Sugar in that environment (after-school sessions,
>> maybe) but they think the kids are too young. They would like for the
>> kids to be 5 at least...
>>
>> > Bryan, you need to postulate your theory more formally :-)
>> >
>>
>> Or, become a Maria incarnate...I'm sure a born-again Montessori will
>> get you tremendous following ;-)
>>
>> cheers,
>> Sameer
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] Content Delivery Network is in production

[David Farning]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Yama Ploskonka  wrote:
> I'll post to Sur.  Pablo Flores might be the prime actor here.
>
> Dunno if 'guay can ever use the .86, the whole point of .84 was to make it
> usable by the guayish security system AFAIK, but I am suitably ignorant of
> those matters as to fact.

Yes, this is one of the challenges of upstream, downstream
relationships.  Upstreams release according to the mantra "early and
often."  Downstreams deploy according to the mantra "Seldom and
stable."

Eventually, we will get this worked out.  The big thing is for:
1. Sugar Labs to focus on innovating.
2. OLPC (and other oems) to focus on stabilizing those innovations
into a series of hardened products.
3. Deployments to focus on deploying and supporting their customer base.

> If I were right, and I am afraid I might be :-) then we will solve nothing
> on the OLPC servers getting overworked, that will stay, but we might be able
> to get the bundles to be better accessible, but who knows.  By now I've lost
> track who handles servers for OLPC.  Could someone copy direct?

I always go through the Volunteer Infrastructure Group when working
with OLPC on infrastructure stuff.

david

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:10 AM, David Farning 
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Yama Ploskonka 
>> wrote:
>> > wow wow wow, this is a way cool concept.  Local updates that would be
>> > truly
>> > local automagically.  I really would want to know how this ends up
>> > working
>> > for the large deploys , esp. Uruguay.  I have been told that some
>> > servers
>> > are quite overstressed already as it seems (correct me here please) that
>> > as
>> > the machines there are booted they automatically try to connect
>> > somewhere
>> > OLPCish.  If it were true, I guess that should be fixed.
>>
>> Some where between 80 and 90% of activity bundle download traffic
>> comes from Uruguary:)  I am hoping to find a couple of mirrors in
>> Uruguay in the next couple of days.  If you have any leads  We
>> need room for about 30GB of content.
>>
>> Yes, .82 deployments are set to communicate directly with olpc
>> servers.  This has been updated in .86.  Another option is for Sugar
>> Labs to work with the VIG to make our mirror system available to OLPC.
>>
>> david
>>
>> > On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:34 AM, David Farning 
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > Seems to be working pretty well from here in Portugal, download.sl.o
>> >> > gets redirected to download2.sl.o (solarsail @ MIT?) and utwente.nl.
>> >> > Both max out my connection (1.2 MB/s).
>> >>
>> >> Nice, we will be adding mirrors as the system stabilizes.  The goal is
>> >> for the download infrastructure to  be ready to handle 10X the
>> >> bandwidth usage as on the last soas release.
>> >>
>> >> As soon as then SoaS and Marketing teams decide dates for the release
>> >> and associated press releases can someone send notices of those dates
>> >> to the systems mailing.
>> >>
>> >> Last year I had to restart the web server on sunjammer every couple of
>> >> hours when it froze:(  It would be nice to have Bernie and the other
>> >> infrastructure gurus around on days we expect larger than normal loads
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> david
>> >> > Congrats,
>> >> >
>> >> > Tomeu
>> >> ___
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>> >> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>> >
>> >
>
>
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] Content Delivery Network is in production

[David Farning]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Yama Ploskonka  wrote:
> wow wow wow, this is a way cool concept.  Local updates that would be truly
> local automagically.  I really would want to know how this ends up working
> for the large deploys , esp. Uruguay.  I have been told that some servers
> are quite overstressed already as it seems (correct me here please) that as
> the machines there are booted they automatically try to connect somewhere
> OLPCish.  If it were true, I guess that should be fixed.

Some where between 80 and 90% of activity bundle download traffic
comes from Uruguary:)  I am hoping to find a couple of mirrors in
Uruguay in the next couple of days.  If you have any leads  We
need room for about 30GB of content.

Yes, .82 deployments are set to communicate directly with olpc
servers.  This has been updated in .86.  Another option is for Sugar
Labs to work with the VIG to make our mirror system available to OLPC.

david

> On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:34 AM, David Farning 
> wrote:
>>
>> > Seems to be working pretty well from here in Portugal, download.sl.o
>> > gets redirected to download2.sl.o (solarsail @ MIT?) and utwente.nl.
>> > Both max out my connection (1.2 MB/s).
>>
>> Nice, we will be adding mirrors as the system stabilizes.  The goal is
>> for the download infrastructure to  be ready to handle 10X the
>> bandwidth usage as on the last soas release.
>>
>> As soon as then SoaS and Marketing teams decide dates for the release
>> and associated press releases can someone send notices of those dates
>> to the systems mailing.
>>
>> Last year I had to restart the web server on sunjammer every couple of
>> hours when it froze:(  It would be nice to have Bernie and the other
>> infrastructure gurus around on days we expect larger than normal loads
>>
>>
>> david
>> > Congrats,
>> >
>> > Tomeu
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>
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Re: [IAEP] [Systems] Content Delivery Network is in production

[David Farning]

> Seems to be working pretty well from here in Portugal, download.sl.o
> gets redirected to download2.sl.o (solarsail @ MIT?) and utwente.nl.
> Both max out my connection (1.2 MB/s).

Nice, we will be adding mirrors as the system stabilizes.  The goal is
for the download infrastructure to  be ready to handle 10X the
bandwidth usage as on the last soas release.

As soon as then SoaS and Marketing teams decide dates for the release
and associated press releases can someone send notices of those dates
to the systems mailing.

Last year I had to restart the web server on sunjammer every couple of
hours when it froze:(  It would be nice to have Bernie and the other
infrastructure gurus around on days we expect larger than normal loads


david
> Congrats,
>
> Tomeu
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[IAEP] Content Delivery Network is in production

[David Farning]

For the last couple of week, we have been working with Peter Pöml to
set up mirrorbrain as the content deliver network for Sugar Labs.
There are a number advantages for using a content delivery network.

1. Usability -  We can  remove the mirror information from
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry#Download_locations
.  All a _user_ has to worry about is the single
http://download.sugarlabs.org location , redirection to individual
mirrors is invisible to the user.

2. Scalability - Rather that increasing the bandwidth or throughput on
a primary sl.org machine we can distribute the load across a system of
mirrors.  Mirrors are a very well understood concept in free software
delivery.  Mirrorbrain is used by both opensuse and open office with
loads 2 orders of magnitutide above Sugar Labs' loads.

3. Locality - Mirrorbrain uses geoip for to determine the physical
location of downloader and mirrors.  Mirrorbrain can determine the
most appropriate mirror for a given download.

Any traffic going through htp://download.sugarlabs.org (including
activity bundles) will be served through the content delivery network.

david
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[IAEP] Business Address

[David Farning]

One of the challenges that we have been facing over the last couple of
months is the lack of a single physical address for Sugar Labs.  As a
result, organizations we have been working with have been unclear
about how to contact Sugar Labs.

I have bought a P.O. Box and set up a telephone number for Sugar Labs.
 Please use the following address and phone number for business
related matters

Address:
Sugar Labs
P.O. Box 312
Onalaska, WI 54650

Telephone:
(608) 315-2406

thanks
david
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Xoos Special Interest Group

[David Farning]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Martin Langhoff
 wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 10:50 PM, David Farning  
> wrote:
>> As promised, we have started work on the XO operating system SIG at
>> Sugar Labs.  The SIG pages are at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Xoos .
>
> Cool! Who is active around this SIG? (David, it's a bit hard to tell
> if you are making the announcement because you're leading it, or
> because you're the man that makes announcements :-) ).

I would describe myself as the man leading the project until I can
find some one better to replace me.  I can support whoever step ups.
But for this project to work, it needs to be lead by developers.

> I am starting to "smoketest" cjb's builds in my spare time. TBH, at
> this time it feels a lot less polished than the "SoaS2" builds which
> where F-11/Sugar-0.84.

My XOs should be arriving tomorrow:) So I will get to do some testing
and work on creating smokes tests.

> In brief, it feels as if a lot of the stabilization that happened
> around that timeframe exists but it's not in the XOOS build (for
> example: most sample code bits in pippy don't work because "import
> pippy" is broken).

Yes, this is the gap I hope this SIG/Project fills.  There is
innovative stuff going on and there is deployment stuff going on.  But
there is no place for the innovations to stabilize.  The best model
for this is the Fedora-> RedHat relationship.

> I suspect there's a disconnect somewhere, maybe Sebastian's builds use
> a non-fedora repo for Sugar packages, or maybe F-11 Sugar was great
> but the updates broke things.
>
>> Based on feedback from the current developers working in this space,
>> the most valuable starting point will be to start making daily Xoos
>> builds.
>
> Using the same infra as cjb?

I am hoping so.  So far, I have looked at the f11 on 1.0 and f11 on
1.5 work.  Next,  I will look at mdt's soas on XO.  Finally, I will
look at the stuff CJB s doing.  The goal is to stick as close to cjbs
work as possible.


> For starters, I suspect a quick review (and smoketest, if you have hw)
> of cjb's builds would help a ton.

I have XO-1.0s coming.  I would like to start by focusing on the 1.0
to make sure that it does not forgotten about.

davd

> (But of course I'm mostly a bystander here. people more involved in
> this might have other ideas...)
>
> 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
>
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Re: [IAEP] FW: Live webinar: VirtualBox Web Console

[David Farning]

I was talking with Sun about shipping a preconfigured Virtual Box+Sugar
package just before the entered talks with oracle

Mayne it is time to revisit that potential partnership.

david

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:56 PM, Caryl Bigenho  wrote:

>  Hi Folks,
>
> If you would like to learn more about Virtual Box from the engineers
> working on it, you might want to check out this webinar.
>
> Caryl
>
> --
> Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 17:49:40 -0700
> From: s...@communications2.sun.com
> Subject: Live webinar: VirtualBox Web Console
> To: cbige...@hotmail.com
>
>   Live webinar: VirtualBox Web 
> Console
>   [image:
> .]
>*» **Register 
> Now!*
>
> *October VirtualBox Live Show*
> *The VirtualBox Web Console*
>
> Dear Caryl Bigenho,
>
> The VirtualBox Web Console (VBoxWeb) is an open source project implementing
> an AJAX version of the popular VirtualBox user interface. As a modern web
> interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. 
> Join
> us for the next edition of VirtualBox 
> Live,
> where you'll learn how to use VBoxWeb to:
>
>- Browse your virtual machines and inspect their settings
>- Start virtual machines in headless mode
>- Pause/resume VMs
>- Save the state of running VMs
>- Terminate VMs (hard power off or ACPI)
>- Remote control your VMs using the integrated RDP Web Control
>
>  *WHO: *
> Andy Hall and Achim Hasenmueller, VirtualBox Engineering Director
>  *WHAT:*
> *VirtualBox Live 
> Show
> *
>  *WHEN:*
> October 7, 2009, 8:00 am PDT / 11:00 am EDT / 15:00 UTC/GMT
> (The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long, followed by Q&A.)
> *WHERE:*
> Simply access the web seminar from the comfort of your own home or office.
>  *WHY:*
> If you want to save time, money and frustration, you'll want to join this
> webinar on the world's most popular open source virtualization software.
>
>
>  *  Tune in, or miss out. Register now. 
> *
>
> If you have questions or feedback, please send them to
> virtualboxinquir...@sun.com.
>
> Thank you,
> Sun Microsystems, Inc.
>
> PS: If you can't join us live, make sure you catch the archive, which will
> be posted here within 24 hours of the 
> show.
>   Sun Microsystems, Inc. respects your privacy.
> You are receiving this email at cbige...@hotmail.com because of your
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>
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Xoos Special Interest Group

[David Farning]

The core focus of the Sig is to be an upstream for the the deployment releases.

My guess is that while the project is not identical to either Sugar on
a Stick, or Martin's work on making the sugar on a Stick run on the
XO, we will have a very significant code overlap.

I am planning on starting from Steven M. Parrish's F11 on XO1.5 tree
and seeing what happens.

david

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Sebastian Dziallas  wrote:
> David Farning wrote:
>>
>> As promised, we have started work on the XO operating system SIG at
>> Sugar Labs.  The SIG pages are at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Xoos .
>>
>> Based on feedback from the current developers working in this space,
>> the most valuable starting point will be to start making daily Xoos
>> builds.  The next step will be to work with others in this space to
>> create a release cycle which includes alphas, betas, and final
>> releases.  These releases will enable more users and testers to
>> participate in the development cycle.
>
> Martin Dengler has been incredibly pushing an effort to make SoaS run on the
> XO. In fact, for some time now, the "normal" SoaS builds and the SoaS-XO
> builds are using the same code-base. The plan was and is to build and
> announce these snapshots jointly in the very near future. Setting up a cron
> job to have builds should probably be not too hard...
>
> There has even been a feature proposal for that in Launchpad:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/soas/+spec/joint-soas-release
>
> Will this SIG's work be incorporated in the SoaS-XO files (I can't even
> speak of GIT branches anymore, because it's all in mainline now, which is
> just awesome!) or will it create another solution?
>
> --Sebastian
>
>> Initially, communication will happen on the de...@lists.laptop.org,
>> sugar-...@lists.sugarlabs.org, and fedora-olpc-l...@redhat.com mailing
>> lists.
>>
>> We have received initial support from the OLPC contributor program in
>> the form of developer machines.
>>
>> david
>
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Re: [IAEP] 2009-2010 Sugar Labs Oversight Board Election Starting Soon

[David Farning]

We have just received a notice that when voting one person only got a
partial list of candidates.

They solved the issue by discarding the ballot and trying again.

David Farning
SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:32 PM, David Farning  wrote:
> The elections committee has sorted out all of the know voter issues
> which were raised after the trial election earlier this week.
>
> Eligible members should receive a voter token within the next few minutes.
>
> If you have any problems please contact me via this mailing list,
> memb...@sugarlabs.org, or dfarn...@sugarlabs.org
>
> David Farning
> SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
>
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[IAEP] 2009-2010 Sugar Labs Oversight Board Election Starting Soon

[David Farning]

The elections committee has sorted out all of the know voter issues
which were raised after the trial election earlier this week.

Eligible members should receive a voter token within the next few minutes.

If you have any problems please contact me via this mailing list,
memb...@sugarlabs.org, or dfarn...@sugarlabs.org

David Farning
SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
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[IAEP] Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009

[David Farning]

I would like to re-extend the invitation for Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009[1].

As it stands, we have four people currently registered:
   1. Simon Schampijer
   2. Tomeu Vizoso
   3. Walter Bender
   4. David Farning

If anyone else is interested please add your name to the wiki page[1].



1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/Sugarcamp_Bolzano_2009
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Re: [IAEP] Test ballot complete. Feedback

[David Farning]

It turns out that the first five people to request member ship via
mem...@sugarlabs.org were missing from the email roster.

They follow:

* Sebastian Dziallas  | sdz | APPROVED

* Tom Gilliard  | satellit | APPROVED

* Brian Jordan  | Bcjordan | brian | APPROVED

* Caroline Meeks  | APPROVED

* Dave Bauer  | daveb | APPROVED

The membership committee has added them to the roster.

David Farning
SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 6:02 PM, David Farning  wrote:
> I would like to announce the completion of the Sugar Labs Test Election.
>
> Know issues:
> The election server is very overloaded.  It was not uncommon for the
> server to take a minute or more to process a a submission.  As far as
> I can tell everyones vote was processed.  Please keep track of your
> 'token' so you can verify that you vote has been processed correctly.
>
> The test election was mis-configured to run until October 28 instead
> of September 28.  I will verify that the SLOBs election is configured
> correctly.
>
> Incorrect email on membership roster.  I received one notice that
> someone did not receive a voter token.  I will verify their name
> against the membership log and update the email roster list as
> necessary.
>
> Does anyone else have feedback on the test election?  Please submit
> that feedback to this list or to me personally.
>
> David Farning
> SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
>
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Test ballot complete. Feedback

[David Farning]

This situation appears to be based on a missing email to memb...@sugarlabs.org.

In good faith, the membership committee has added Aleksey Lim
 to the membership roster.

David Farning
SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Aleksey Lim  wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 06:02:22PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>> I would like to announce the completion of the Sugar Labs Test Election.
>>
>> Know issues:
>> The election server is very overloaded.  It was not uncommon for the
>> server to take a minute or more to process a a submission.  As far as
>> I can tell everyones vote was processed.  Please keep track of your
>> 'token' so you can verify that you vote has been processed correctly.
>>
>> The test election was mis-configured to run until October 28 instead
>> of September 28.  I will verify that the SLOBs election is configured
>> correctly.
>>
>> Incorrect email on membership roster.  I received one notice that
>> someone did not receive a voter token.  I will verify their name
>> against the membership log and update the email roster list as
>> necessary.
>>
>> Does anyone else have feedback on the test election?  Please submit
>> that feedback to this list or to me personally.
>>
>> David Farning
>> SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
>> ___
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>
> Didn't get any feedback and voter tokens on my email to members@ as well.
>
> --
> Aleksey
>
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[IAEP] Test ballot complete. Feedback

[David Farning]

I would like to announce the completion of the Sugar Labs Test Election.

Know issues:
The election server is very overloaded.  It was not uncommon for the
server to take a minute or more to process a a submission.  As far as
I can tell everyones vote was processed.  Please keep track of your
'token' so you can verify that you vote has been processed correctly.

The test election was mis-configured to run until October 28 instead
of September 28.  I will verify that the SLOBs election is configured
correctly.

Incorrect email on membership roster.  I received one notice that
someone did not receive a voter token.  I will verify their name
against the membership log and update the email roster list as
necessary.

Does anyone else have feedback on the test election?  Please submit
that feedback to this list or to me personally.

David Farning
SLOBs election 2009-2010 referee
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[IAEP] Xoos Special Interest Group

[David Farning]

As promised, we have started work on the XO operating system SIG at
Sugar Labs.  The SIG pages are at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Xoos .

Based on feedback from the current developers working in this space,
the most valuable starting point will be to start making daily Xoos
builds.  The next step will be to work with others in this space to
create a release cycle which includes alphas, betas, and final
releases.  These releases will enable more users and testers to
participate in the development cycle.

Initially, communication will happen on the de...@lists.laptop.org,
sugar-...@lists.sugarlabs.org, and fedora-olpc-l...@redhat.com mailing
lists.

We have received initial support from the OLPC contributor program in
the form of developer machines.

david
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Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-news] Election status update

[David Farning]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 9:43 AM, DancesWithCars
 wrote:
> more inline
>
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Sascha Silbe
>  wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 02:20:43AM -0400, DancesWithCars wrote:
>>
> missing the lead up paragraph
>
>>> Then a frozen membership list, first before a call
>>> for elections.
>>
>> Please don't spread FUD.
>>
> It's Not FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt),
> it's ANGER!
>
>> This has been discussed over a month ago:
>>
> That's nice, but I wasn't on the list then...
> I'm noob to this sugar list as first
> paragraph shows some issues
> with signing up for mailman
> (could have sworn I tried a long time
> ago...)

I am sorry if you are frustrated.  One of the hardest and most
important parts of open source development is sticking to the release
cycle.

In order to coordinate the efforts of large numbers of volunteers
(please remember that every contributor at Sugar Labs is a volunteer),
we must set and enforce deadline.  If we let deadlines slip without a
very good reason, they quickly become meaningless.

With that being said, I have taken a snapshot of the membership list
provided by the membership committee as of the freeze election freeze
date for use in this election.  I would encourage the membership
committee to open the membership merger window again.  I would also
like to encourage you and any other new participants to apply for
membership.

david
2009-2010 SLOBs Election Referee
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