Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
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. 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 sebast...@fuentelibre.orgwrote: El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió: On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.comwrote: 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 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.comwrote: 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. This wiped out a year and a half of hard work on my part and others who were successfully building SoaS as the pillar of our marketing strategy, cf. BBC coverage etc. We had been marketing SoaS as a concept - Sugar on OLPC now available on a $5 stick. Mel's approach was to turn SoaS into an example of how Fedora was well-suited as a technical platform for themed spins - certainly true, but of no interest to teachers. Unfortunately, key components for a smooth teacher experience - an up-to-date liveUSB installer, Sugar branded first-run screens such as Trisquel - became more, not less difficult to create with the spin status. Of course, this wasn't the only effort by community members to lay claim to SoaS; a former contributor had even registered a domain name and built a separate SoaS minisite, hoping to obtain exclusive distribution rights, and only closed the site under pressure. In traditional free software projects, engineers make the decisions then communicate (usually quite late in the process) with their marketers. This is almost completely ineffective, which is why I wasn't prepared to contribute time and expertise under those conditions. The several thousand USD I had contributed to seed the marketing effort (remember the branded USB sticks?) had allowed us to obtain excellent results, however as of two years ago I've been unable to continue that financing for personal reasons. Looking forward, I myself feel prebuilt VMs with pancake installers for Windows, OSX and GNU/Linux (including SoaS images cf. [1]) would be our best bet to offer a Sugar experience to interested teachers. I use a VirtualBox VM on a Mac when I present Sugar to audiences, and it works very well, inheriting network connections, fullscreen etc. Of course, the downside is enormous download images, and I don't underestimate the work and infrastructure required to keep a matrix of images available. So yes Peter, I salute your hard work on SoaS; for want of a better strategy it has even been kept on the SL homepage for three years. However, for SoaS to aid SL in raising awareness, allowing teachers to overcome the installation and unfamiliarity barriers, and providing a path to non-OLPC hardware in a world massively dropping the PC for tablets, additional teacher-friendly components are necessary and the marketing needs to be done by marketers. Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator P.S. I'm quite interested in your proposals concerning ARM boxes; I have always maintained that a non-OLPC OEM deal would allow us to bypass the installation barrier. That said, my interest in the Raspberry Pi is from a marketing standpoint - they have over a million sold, corporate sponsorships in the UK, wide press coverage, retail distributors, only one official SD card OS for non-advanced users, and are seeking education partners to better reach students. 1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Virtual_machines ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
El 06/11/13 17:35, Sean DALY escribió: On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com mailto:pbrobin...@gmail.com 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 ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Daniel Narvaez dwnarv...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 November 2013 23:05, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi might have an interesting marketing effect but the result would be truly terrible as it would be essentially unusable and have a terrible experience. Can you elaborate on why you think it would be a terrible experience on the Raspberry Pi? I never tested it there, I was just hoping it could be a nice target... It's generally not particularly fast and has a number of HW problems, as a look at how cool we are I wouldn't be chosing the RPi to run sugar on Android, even on Linux the experience isn't great. There are a number of other ARM devices that sugar runs beautifully on though. It would also be interesting to know more about these devices. With OLPC going the Android way, I wish there was at least one popular enough device on which we could provide a really good experience (with our scarce resources). Well Fedora produces SoaS on ARM images that will run on any of the ARM platforms Fedora supports. I would be looking at BeagleBone Black [1] (improvements still needed, should be much better soon), Wandboard [2], Utilite [3] (little brother to the TrimSlice) or the CuBox-i [4]. The last of which has the cheapest model at $45 in a case and will be much faster, we should have OOTB graphics for the last 3 devices (all based on the i.MX6) in Fedora 21 (maybe later in the F-20 cycle) and the experience will be much better for little to no price increase over the RPi. [1] http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black [2] http://www.wandboard.org/ [3] http://utilite-computer.com/ [4] http://cubox-i.com/table/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
Ok, I will reply to your points, just in different order: On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 6:53 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Gonzalo - I'm sorry, I was unable to attend the SLOBs meeting today. There are issues with doing PR about the release * Our target market, the ten million or so grade-school teachers worldwide, can't benefit from the release; there are no installers. There are detailed instructions for using virtualization on the wiki thanks to satellit, and the consistently good work of probinson on SoaS, but the release itself won't be news if no one can use it. You are right. May be is better wait until we have images to install. I am working now on this, and can report when is finished. SoaS is the the other candidate. * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC. Yes, we are at a crossroads. But Sugar is not OLPC. Is sad lost the support of OLPC, but also open the opportunity of re-think who are we and what is our space. OLPC was, from the name, driven by hardware, running a run difficult to win when you are small, but needed because nobody else was interested in doing it. This situation did OLPC invest more in the low level stuff than in Sugar. Also, in retrospective, is possible we had a attitude of we know better and wasn't trying to solve the specific problems of teacher in classrooms. As you say, the landscape now is different, cheap (and at times crap) hardware is available, but also there are a expensive option (all the Apple stuff) and a almost open option (Android). Google started to monetize the education space ̣[1] [2], how we will fight against that? In my personal view, we are the option of software, open, free, focused in our specific range of ages, with a special design to work in schools, with a pedagogical background and with the possibility to work with low connectivity. The low connectivity space will be smaller every time, but we can (and need) improve the solutions we provide to teachers and to schools, and improve our use of free and open resources. If you ask me about a strategy, is the best I can think right now :) For these reasons (as mentioned on the marketing list) an Activity/pedagogical focus is a safe bet. I agree. Unfortunately our Turtle Art Day PR flopped because publication of the Spanish PR was delayed by two days (technical bottleneck which I very much hope we will be able to solve). The PR will however fulfill its role of background for interested journalists (www.sugarlabs.org/press). I haven't expected any wider press coverage for some time now, since we don't have any easy-to-try products available and OLPC's press communications are meant to imply that laptops are out and the Android tablet is in, leaving Sugar in limbo. An easy installation use procedure for Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi could have major press impact, but I don't know how near or far we are from those. Even if we install Sugar in a RasperryPi, this solve the testing for hobbyists, is not a solution for schools or kids. The upcoming TA Days and internationalization work grant will give us ample opportunity to mention the release, but we need to know where we are going if we hope to get a message out on that topic. I agree. We need focus our (few) resources, thing strategically, and have a consistent message and development. Gonzalo Sean [1] http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/edu/index.html [2] http://www.google.com/edu/android/ On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: One topic to add could be do a PR about our recent sugar 0.100 release. Gonzalo On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: We have a SLOB meeting scheduled for Monday, 4 November at 9AM EST (2PM GMT). Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Tenemos una reunión SLOB programada para el lunes, 4 de noviembre a 09 a.m. EST (14:00 GMT). Por favor, únase a nosotros en irc.freenode.net #-sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Topics: (1) election (2) ambassadors (3) tech/learning meetups (4) status of Trip Advisor grant (5) Google Code In (6) your topic here... -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Lista olpc-Sur olpc-...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur ___ Lista olpc-Sur
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
Gonzalo - I'm sorry, I was unable to attend the SLOBs meeting today. There are issues with doing PR about the release * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC. * Our target market, the ten million or so grade-school teachers worldwide, can't benefit from the release; there are no installers. There are detailed instructions for using virtualization on the wiki thanks to satellit, and the consistently good work of probinson on SoaS, but the release itself won't be news if no one can use it. For these reasons (as mentioned on the marketing list) an Activity/pedagogical focus is a safe bet. Unfortunately our Turtle Art Day PR flopped because publication of the Spanish PR was delayed by two days (technical bottleneck which I very much hope we will be able to solve). The PR will however fulfill its role of background for interested journalists ( www.sugarlabs.org/press). I haven't expected any wider press coverage for some time now, since we don't have any easy-to-try products available and OLPC's press communications are meant to imply that laptops are out and the Android tablet is in, leaving Sugar in limbo. An easy installation use procedure for Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi could have major press impact, but I don't know how near or far we are from those. The upcoming TA Days and internationalization work grant will give us ample opportunity to mention the release, but we need to know where we are going if we hope to get a message out on that topic. Sean On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: One topic to add could be do a PR about our recent sugar 0.100 release. Gonzalo On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: We have a SLOB meeting scheduled for Monday, 4 November at 9AM EST (2PM GMT). Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Tenemos una reunión SLOB programada para el lunes, 4 de noviembre a 09 a.m. EST (14:00 GMT). Por favor, únase a nosotros en irc.freenode.net #-sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Topics: (1) election (2) ambassadors (3) tech/learning meetups (4) status of Trip Advisor grant (5) Google Code In (6) your topic here... -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Lista olpc-Sur olpc-...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur ___ Lista olpc-Sur olpc-...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Gonzalo - I'm sorry, I was unable to attend the SLOBs meeting today. There are issues with doing PR about the release * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC. * Our target market, the ten million or so grade-school teachers worldwide, can't benefit from the release; there are no installers. There are detailed instructions for using virtualization on the wiki thanks to satellit, and the consistently good work of probinson on SoaS, but the release itself won't be news if no one can use it. But you have for a long time refused to actually even market SoaS! For these reasons (as mentioned on the marketing list) an Activity/pedagogical focus is a safe bet. Unfortunately our Turtle Art Day PR flopped because publication of the Spanish PR was delayed by two days (technical bottleneck which I very much hope we will be able to solve). The PR will however fulfill its role of background for interested journalists (www.sugarlabs.org/press). I haven't expected any wider press coverage for some time now, since we don't have any easy-to-try products available and OLPC's press communications are meant to imply that laptops are out and the Android tablet is in, leaving Sugar in limbo. An easy installation use procedure for Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi could have major press impact, but I don't know how near or far we are from those. Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi might have an interesting marketing effect but the result would be truly terrible as it would be essentially unusable and have a terrible experience. There are a number of other ARM devices that sugar runs beautifully on though. Ultimately marketing needs to actually actively engage with the rest of the people doing the work to find out what's being done and market on something to ensure Sugar is regularly in the news to keep it in people's mind as opposed to waiting and hoping for a single enormous event. Peter ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On 4 November 2013 22:53, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: * It's not clear to me where we are going. I'm afraid you are not the only one feeling that way. It's much easier said than done, but we need to figure out where we are going and to communicate it clearly inside the community. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On 4 November 2013 23:05, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: Sugar on Android or the Raspberry Pi might have an interesting marketing effect but the result would be truly terrible as it would be essentially unusable and have a terrible experience. Can you elaborate on why you think it would be a terrible experience on the Raspberry Pi? I never tested it there, I was just hoping it could be a nice target... There are a number of other ARM devices that sugar runs beautifully on though. It would also be interesting to know more about these devices. With OLPC going the Android way, I wish there was at least one popular enough device on which we could provide a really good experience (with our scarce resources). ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
On 4 November 2013 22:53, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC. I'll try to express briefly my feelings about the directions the project could take. Note that I might be missing a lot of what is going on above the technical level. * The XO is not a viable hardware platform other than for existing deployments. OLPC is pretty clearly going in a different direction. * Sugar web activities on the top of a full Android loses too much of the Sugar value proposition. It's great to have it in addition to Sugar-the-OS, but it's not enough alone. * From the technical point of view there are several ways to get Sugar-the-OS running on tactile devices. Unfortunately it's not clear to me that any of these devices is open enough to be viable for deployments or ordinary users. -- Daniel Narvaez ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting
Walter, I will be at the meeting, and expect to arrive late. Gerald On Sunday, November 3, 2013, Walter Bender wrote: We have a SLOB meeting scheduled for Monday, 4 November at 9AM EST (2PM GMT). Please join us on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Tenemos una reunión SLOB programada para el lunes, 4 de noviembre a 09 a.m. EST (14:00 GMT). Por favor, únase a nosotros en irc.freenode.net #-sugar-meeting (chat.sugarlabs.org) Topics: (1) election (2) ambassadors (3) tech/learning meetups (4) status of Trip Advisor grant (5) Google Code In (6) your topic here... -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Lista olpc-Sur olpc-...@lists.laptop.org javascript:; http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
