Planet Sugar

Hace unos dias terminé de leer "Nativos Digitales" de Alejandro Piscitelli. Si bien no estoy de acuerdo en todo lo que dice, está lleno de informacion interesante, es casi un hiperlibro o hipertexto (con innumerables llamadas al pie) y deja probablemente lo mejor que puede dejar un libro: ganas de leer mucho más.
El capítulo de juegos era el que mas me interesaba y alli encontré informacion acerca de http://www.ludology.org/ de Gonzalo Frasca, que ademas comenzó un blog en castellano http://www.ludologia.org/
Me interesa mucho su tesis VIDEOGAMES OF THE OPPRESSED:
VIDEOGAMES AS A MEANS FOR CRITICAL THINKING AND DEBATE

Otros sitios interesante que encontré estos dias relacionados con Sugar y las XO son:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sur
http://ceibalbellaunion.blogspot.com/
http://xoplanet.blogspot.com/

One of my two jobs for the week for Lynne May’s SoaS deployment is getting hardware for all this to run on.

The first (and largest) purchases we’ll have to make are the netbooks. Peter Robinson, our resident Fedora netbook guru, looked earlier for something that fit our specs and price range ($1000 USD for 3 netbooks) while being sturdily-built (mechanical design is important; we’ve got first-graders here) with a good battery life. One requirement was known compatibility with recent versions of Fedora, since SoaS is Fedora-based (the next release will be a Fedora Spin) and we’re trying to stack the deck in favor of the software and hardware working together as smoothly as possible. Based on these criteria, Peter recommended the Acer Aspire One 532h, which is about $300.

(photo cc-by from ndevil)

Lynne May also wanted a little video/still camera to capture the students playing with Sugar – they’re still learning to read and write, so having an easy way to record verbal presentations (and demos/screencasts, for that matter) in the classroom means we’ll get that much more documented output. (We will, however, need to get permission from the parents of individual kids to share the video material.) But right now we just need to get the hardware – so I pointed her towards the Kodak zi8 which can be had refurbished for about $150 USD and has gotten a big thumbs-up from Mo Duffy. Seriously, I borrowed it at the office two months after she got it and she was still raving about it, so it’s got to be good stuff. Waiting for the +1 on funding for that.

(One of the things I’ve learned while writing this post: finding CC-licensed photos of hardware is hard. I couldn’t find one for the zi8.)

And of course we need the sticks themselves. We need 14 sticks (9 students, 1 teacher, 4 testing/backup) and need them to have caps that aren’t removable, because that’s just asking for lost caps in a classroom full of 6-7 year olds. Other than that, we don’t really care what we get, so this should be easy to source once we get the (very small) amount of funding needed for them. (Yes, when you’re working with a classroom, $100 can be a blocker.)

(Original images cc-by from molotalk – superdry, red bull/honda, ship, and banana. Also, this picture should make it painfully obvious why I need friends like Nikki to fix my wince-inducing color schemes.)

I’m going to be placing orders early on Monday morning, so any last-minute feedback (including running screaming in our direction going “noooooooooo this is a bad ideaaaaaaa!” if applicable) would be muchly appreciated.

A good learning environment for self-directed learning has a low entry, wide walls and high ceiling. That is, it is easy for beginners, can facilitate a wide range of creative efforts and is unrestricted in top end complexity.

Turtle Art for the Sugar operating system started out as a nice little, Logo like, drawing package
for young learners. Its Turtle and Pen pallets allowed young learners to draw geometric shapes, solve problems and learn a bit about geometry and logic.

Its Scratch like interlocking program blocks made programming foolproof.

Maybe a year ago, Walter Bender introduced the Portfolio pallet, which allows the integration of multimedia into this simple programming language. This extended the use of Turtle Art into literacy activities.

Python programmable blocks were also added, this extended the ceiling, there was no effective limit to the top end functionality. There is however a big leap from drag and drop progam blocks to object oriented Python which limits the usefulness of these blocks.

Recently Walter and Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés have done a major rewrite of Turtle Art, the pre-release version (at the time of writing), version 83 is here. Variable names and block stack (subroutine) names are now themselves variables. These variables can be numeric or string and the + operator can concatenate both data types. This greatly increases the power of Turtle Art while staying with familiar drag and drop block programming.

The program shown above above creates a 10x10 array of variables. The variable "index" contains a string RnCm where n and m are the row and column. The variable "index" is used to name 100 variables named R1C1 to R10C10 which have the value Row x Column stored in them.

A variable "subroutine" or stack name is also used. On the first pass, "runarray" calls stack "doit" to create the array and initialise the array values on the second pass it calls stack "printit" to display the array values.

Now a wide range of sophisticated programming is possible. For example, Turtle Art could compute fractals but the slow execution of the underling Python interpreted language is a major limitation.

There's something in the air that's desperately needed for Sugar on a Stick and its future development: deployments - as a central pillar of its philosophy.

Caroline and Simon are already using it in Boston and Berlin and now there's a new one emerging. Mel and Lynne May are going to run a local deployment. In a way, this is going to lower the entry-barrier for other people interested in running deployments.

Mel's blog post has all the awesome details, so I'll just refer you there.

Now what can you do? As you've probably heard, Sugar on a Stick is going to become a Fedora Spin. This is important, because it's a significant part of the effort to make the whole SoaS project sustainable. So we need help especially concerning packaging and reviewing activities [1], to ensure a consistent user experience compared to the former releases. We've a wiki page and a tracking bug, as well as weekly meetings in #fedora-olpc on 1500 UTC.

Just stop by and introduce yourself - do so on-list.

[1] If you're new to packaging software for Fedora, you might be interested in skimming the logs of our recent Fedora Classroom session.

From the department of what-Mel-does-in-her-free-time: We’re doing a Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) deployment in my aunt Lynne May’s 9-student first-grade class, and just got the green light from the school to proceed – so I’m going to jump straight into documenting what we’re doing, and then (in later posts) fill in the background and continue to get us in shape for being good open source citizens with things like project wiki pages not in my userspace and better meeting notes and whatnot.

This means it might be confusing for a while (because we’ll be writing about things for which the background context may initially be missing) but if you’re curious, please ask questions – they’ll give me things to write more about in future posts, too! (And yes, the other people involved with the deployment should be hitting Planet Sugar Labs with their posts shortly as well.)

The curricular theme for the second half of first grade at this school has traditionally been “community” – so Lynne May is planning her curriculum so the kids spend the whole semester learning (in a very exploratory way) about the Sugar Labs community and coming up with ways to convey their understanding of how open source participation works. For comparison, they’ll be looking at open source communities in parallel with two other kids of communities: their school (all together) and the neighborhood they (individually) live in.

And they’ll be participating upstream – this was important to Lynne May, that we find a way for the students to become a part of an open source community. We’re watching for opportunities throughout term for them to submit bug reports, blog on Planet Sugar Labs, participate in online meetings (in IRC, with a computer hooked to a wall projector and a grown-up typing and helping them read), and generally listening for things the Sugar (and Sugar-in-Fedora) community needs that they can make, and making them.

I am excited.

The game plan for the week is something like this – note that we’re deliberately trying to keep things simple and the workload low so that we’re all only spending a few extra hours a week on this deployment (the work should be minimal, and the vast majority of that work should be stuff we would have to do anyway).

• In user-land: Lynne May is continuing to work with school administration on getting (and keeping!) our all-clear-to-proceed status, and starting to think about how to inform parents. She’s also spending more time getting to know various Activities, as shehas played with Sugar multiple times before, but never in the “how will I use this in my classroom right now?” sense. Last night’s adventure was Etoys, which was ultimately deemed too difficult to work with first-graders on within the scope of our deployment. We would love to be proven wrong about this, by the way – the concern is mostly that we’d spend so much time getting through the basics of Etoys that this is all we’d be able to do for the last 4 months of the school year.
• In support-and-testing land: I am purchasing hardware  and putting up our remaining bit of infrastructure: a test case system. Sugar Labs Infrastructure wizard (and head honcho) Bernie Innocenti has given me the access mojo needed to get Semantic Mediawiki on a test box – which is really all we need for a 4-month experiment. It’s not like the absence of a test case system will block the ability of the class to work with SoaS, but if we can get a good test case system going, the things we learn could also help other projects, so it’s something I’m going to be trying.
• In development land: Sebastian is getting the rawhide composes working for the SoaS build we’ll be using – we’re going to be testers for the F13-based spin, with Blueberry (the current stable version) as our fallback in case anything explodes. This in itself is a big task, which means that we could use some help with packaging Activities.

Our next check-in meeting is Thursday. We still need to figure out a regular check-in on curricular matters (so far, Lynne May and I have just been talking casually every evening – I live with her family, so this is easy… and we need to start documenting these conversations) – but we touch base on technical matters at the weekly Fedora Sugar meetings in #fedora-olpc on Thursdays at 1500 UTC (10am EST).

Anyone is welcome to join in; the meetings are for any Sugar work being done in Fedora. All the agenda items have so far been somehow related to this deployment, but if you’ve got your own SoaS deployment, are working on Activity packaging, are interested in getting Sugar packages in EPEL to work towards Sugar being available on RHEL in the future, that all fits – join us!

We return to Gallaudet University this snowy February to meet two young social entrepreneurs who are making a big difference in the OLPC community.

What: Family XO Meetup
When: Saturday, February 20th, 2010, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: We are UPSTAIRS from the old meeting rooms in the basement on the first floor [floorplan], in computer lab SAC 1010, Washington, D.C. 20002

In the summer of 2009, Beth Santos (pictured above left with kids) worked with OLPC and an NGO to successfully deploy 100 XO laptops at a secondary school on the small island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, which is in the Gulf of Guinea off the western equatorial coast of Africa. Beth will share some stories from her remarkable journey and detail her plans to return to the island this year with more laptops.

Perfectly complimenting Beth’s talk, Luke Faraone, a longtime member of the Learning Club, will conduct a beginner’s workshop on maintaining and repairing the XO laptop hardware. Luke runs the Learning Club’s busy repair center, which is authorized by OLPC to install original replacement parts and revive laptop software that refuses to start.  The XO laptop is uniquely designed to be easily repaired in the field with an ordinary screwdriver. Please bring your XO laptop and a small Phillips head screwdriver if you want to follow along.

More help for the children of Haiti

After the devastating earthquake in Haiti, many immediately thought of the rugged XO laptop as a perfect solution for bringing education to the children in the camps. In addition to longer-term plans with other NGOs, OLPC has come up with a plan to recover unused Give One, Get One laptops. Visit the OLPC blog for details on where to ship if you have one to donate.

Upcoming events…

Thursday, March 11 - Project H Design has begun its Design Revolution Road Show featuring a display of 36 innovative products (from their book of 100, which includes the XO laptop) that are making a significant social impact in the world. The national mobile tour brings their Airstream trailer to Baltimore for a stop and evening lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Saturday, March 20 - We’ll be back at the Arlington Career Center.

J5 has had the great idea of proposing a GNOME Foundation-sponsored hackfest to bring needed pushes to Python 3 and GObject Introspection support to PyGObject.

The situation in which we are today is not very comfortable, as more and more people are wanting to move their projects to Python 3.x and the old static bindings are not being able to cope with new API added to existing libraries and with new GObject-based libraries. A lot of people out there are known to be using PyGTK in long-term projects, so we really need to get our act together.

AFAICS, the plan on the table right now is to make PyGObject and PyGI run on Python 3.x and drop the static bindings, instead of having to port all of them to Python 3.x. Another possibility is to drop PyGObject altogether and have standalone python bindings for GObject Introspection, but that would reimplement lots of stuff already in PyGObject.

Have started a thread in the PyGTK mailing list: http://www.daa.com.au/pipermail/pygtk/2010-February/018222.html

Please pass this idea to whoever you think could be interested, more details will come soon.

UPDATE: have started a proposal in the GNOME wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Python2010. Once we have a better idea of who is interested in attending, I will complete it further.

The Sugar Labs Oversight Board has been talking about 2010 goals; I wrote down a first draft of mine and wanted to toss them out here (hey, release early, release often!)

My personal views on annual goals for Sugar Labs: Rather than having overarching goals set from the top-down that everyone in Sugar Labs runs towards for 2010, I’d like to see individuals within the community state and document their own individual goals for 2010, so we can easily find areas of intersection-of-interest that would advance the mission of Sugar Labs. If enough individuals pick up on the same goal and then pool together to accomplish it, then it becomes a de facto “community goal” – but one formed organically from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down.

In that vein, here’s my current thinking on what my own goals within Sugar Labs for 2010 might be. This implies stuff that I am willing to take responsibility for – I plan on being involved in driving each of these goals forward.

1. An average contributor should be able to participate in SL on a minimum of 4 hours a week – that’s 1 hour for a team meeting, 1 hour keeping up with lists, and 2 (or more) hours actually doing stuff. (Prerequisite: having weekly team meetings, having all conversations for a team logged to its mailing list, etc.)

This goal could probably have a better final wording, but my intent is to make it so that when you decide to join the Sugar Labs community, you can quickly (without needing to spend weeks soaking up a lot of context that us old hands tend to take for granted) settle into the rhythm of a smaller group you can quickly get to personally know, that will mentor/coach/support you.

I’m currently stepping towards this goal via my work on a small local SoaS deployment (we’re waiting for the final administrative approval needed to announce it and make all our notes so far transparent – hopefully that will happen tonight; lack of transparency is totally driving me nuts, so it’ll be a relief for this to get resolved). We’re trying to keep the time commitment low for everyone involved, while still maintaining strong links between everybody in the project – it’s a small sandbox within which we can experiment with collaboration. This is only a start, but it’s a start.

2. A regularly occurring, annual (to begin with) and planned far (more than 6 months) in advance, Sugar Camp. We need a rhythm for our community to settle into, and since we have a much larger percentage of non-technical contributors than many open source projects do, we need to set our heartbeat around something broader than our software release cycle. More on this later.

3. Listen. Too often I sprint hard on Getting Stuff Done and shouting out as much of what I’m doing as I go along – which is all wonderful, but has a missing part that I sometimes forget. Listening. Finding out what other people are doing, echoing/reflecting/summarizing it back to make sure that I understand, and then – if there’s a chance to do so – finding those small opportunities for synergy between my work and theirs. I need to take more time to find out and keep up with what others are doing, ask them what they’d like, what sort of help they need.

This is actually something that’s motivating my second goal of having Sugar Camp – what I want from such an event is a way for all of us – at some point in the future that we can all aim for and schedule in – to come together and take a breath all at once and share and reflect on what we’ve been up to.

Those are my thoughts, more or less braindumped at the moment (though I’ve been mulling these in my head for a few weeks before forming them into written English sentences). What are yours?

Thanks to OLPC and their local government, every child in the Argentinian state of La Rioja will use Sugar to learn, both at school and outside. Note that this includes thousands of children (and families) that would have never owned a computer otherwise.

I'm happy to note that they see the Uruguayan experience as a model to follow. In Uruguay the laptop deployment is something that the whole society has taken ownership of and thus is having a deep and broad impact everywhere.

I'm looking forward to work with the Argentinian free software community in improving the educational opportunities of their children through hacking on Sugar.

Thanks to Gonzalo Odiard from Sugar Labs Argentina for passing the news.

Next week I'll be giving two talks about Sugar in the Igalia office in A Coruña, Galiza, Spain. The first one will be of introductory nature, talking about Sugar's history, the community around it and future perspectives. The second will be more of a workshop on how to contribute features and bug fixes. The talks will be part of the Free Software Master that Igalia runs in partnership with the Rey Juan Carlos University, but other interested people are welcome to join us.

The talks will be in Spanish and will take place on Thursday 11th February 2010 from 16 to 19, at Bugallal Marchesi, 22, 1º, A Coruña:

* 16:00-17:15 Introducción a Sugar, historia, comunidad, oportunidades
* 17:45-19:00 Charla técnica / taller sobre cómo realizar contribuciones

I'm very happy to see Igalia's interest on Sugar, in my opinion it isn't a coincidence that a company with a strong commitment to Free Software sees education as an important area through which fulfil their social mission.

Por fin se puede dar a conocer!
La provincia de la Rioja, pondrá en marcha un proyecto de entrega de laptops OLPC a los alumnos de las escuelas primarias y a sus docentes. Invertiran 1.2 millones de dolares en el proyecto.
En estos dias se daran a conocer en los medios nacionales.
Aqui varios links con la noticia:

http://tecnologia.iprofesional.com/notas/93943-La-PC-barata-de-Negroponte-desembarca-en-la-Argentina-para-pelear-contra-Intel.html

http://www.somoslarioja.com/v1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2365:avanza-la-compra-directa-de-60-mil-laptop-por-48-millones-de-pesos-&catid=35:locales&Itemid=63

http://www.lacapital.com.ar/ed_impresa/2010/1/edicion_463/contenidos/noticia_5205.html

http://fenix951.com.ar.webten.alsolnet.com/sitio/noticias.asp?id=46318

http://www.idukay.edu.ar/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=825:iporque-qjoaquin-v-gonzalezq&catid=80:para-comentar

Alan Boyle, reporting for MSNBC some of the sadder news from the last week:

Nine months after the Spirit rover sank into a Martian sand trap, NASA says the troubled traveler will have to remain stationary in order to survive the Red Planet’s winter.

These fucking Martians keep leaving their deadly sand traps everywhere. No regard for life or property. Can’t we, like, send John McCain up there to keep these guys in line?

Sugar Digest

1. I am once again falling behind in my writing. This time I have two excuses: travel and coding. I spent last week in Miami, not to escape the cold Boston winter, but to attend the OLPC deployment meeting. (This is first time since I left OLPC almost two-years ago that I have been invited to participate in an OLPC event.) It was great to see many old friends with passion in their hearts for the project. The highlight of the week was of course the presentations from the deployments. Many of the larger OLPC deployments gave detailed updates of the progress and plans—all of which include Sugar. The variety of means by which the deployments engage in outreach was fascinating. For example, in Paraguay, which still has a relatively modest deployment, they have been setting the stage for an eventual nationwide roll-out by publishing weekly “how-to-use Sugar” storyboards in the newspaper. In every case, the deployment teams have been considering not just the technology, but also their cultural context. The vector is pointing in the right direction.

A concrete idea that surfaced during the discussions was to explicitly add the creation of a local Sugar Lab to the offering whenever OLPC partners with new deployment. The local lab would provide the means for the local community to nurture growth in their local Free Software community and to engage with the global Sugar community more systemically and efficiently. Another result from the meeting is that Claudia Urrea, one the education/deployment leads for OLPC, will be joining our Design Team meetings. Her direct feedback will be very helpful.

2. Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés and I are finally to the point where we would like some testing and feedback on the Turtle Art refactoring project. We have been rewriting much of code over the past month with several goals in mind: (1) make it easier to maintain; (2) make it easier to localize; (3) make it easier to incorporate new features; and (4) make it easier for the end-user to modify.

So far, we have completed a major refactoring of the code:

• object-oriented
• 90% smaller download bundle-size
• faster first-time launch
• simplified i18n maintenance
• easier to add new blocks and palettes

and added new user interface features:

• support for multiple turtles
• expandable blocks
• trash palette (with a restore button)
• variable-length string blocks
• editable strings

Still to come:

• a new collaboration model, where multiple turtles are shared
• conversion to Cairo graphics for the Turtle
• better program visualization during run-time

You can download the new Turtle Art for testing from TurtleArt-83.xo. The source is in the refactoring branch of the TurtleArt project on gitorious.

3. It is worthwhile to periodically check on the Sugar-related materials being created in the field. For example, the teachers in Uruguay continue to assemble lesson plans for using Sugar in the classroom at the Plan Ceibal website. There is a real wealth of materials there.

4. Thanks to an introduction by Chuck Kane, I am in touch with the team that developed GeoGebra. GeoGebra is free software for learning and teaching mathematics. Written in Java, “it combines interactive geometry, algebra, calculus, and spread-sheets in one easy-to-use system for students of all ages.” It could be a candidate for Aleksey Lim’s Sugar Services efforts.

In the community

5. Kevin Mauricio Benavides Castro pointed out to me an article about the work going on in rural Nicuaragua (See [1]).

6. Cristian Paul Peñaranda Rojas has created an XO-man-inspired case for Sugar-on-a-Stick. You can download the CAD model from  Thingiverse.

7. Hilaire Fernandes, the author of DrGeo, is looking for feedback on his interactive geometry software (developed with Squeak and deployed on Etoys).

Tech talk

8. The Design Team is meeting with great regularity and is making progress on many of the 0.88 features. You can follow the progress in the wiki.

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past two weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM and SOM). The latter image does a nice job of visualizing the on-going discussion about trademarks.

As member of the Sugar community, I'm very happy to read from Jono Bacon the Ubuntu plans about what he calls opportunistic programmers. In Sugar we believe that doing is an important part of learning, that's one of the reasons for considering free software a fundamental part of what we do.

Though the goals stated in the referred post match almost exactly what we are aiming for as well, I find something missing: bigger components to create your applications with. Python, the GNOME platform and DesktopCouch are awesome technologies that fit very well for this purpose (Sugar itself is built on Python and GNOME) but the components provided are rather small, meaning that you need to build all the functionality you need from these small bricks. What if you want to generate a PDF and want a real-time preview? Or an ODT document? One that users edit collaboratively across the network in real time? Would you have to write those thousands of lines yourself?

We have thought that by also providing coarse components such as Abiword, Evince, Mozilla and Gnash that people can use in their applications, what user-programmers can do widens considerably, keeping the complexity of their own code to a minimum.

I know this will sound to some as too much like Bonobo, but really, this is so much more light-weight both in computational and human resources terms, and most importantly, it's being widely used today. My post about embedding evince is the most popular in this blog, one year after it was written.

I would like to see a bigger effort from GNOME application developers so their code can be reused in this way. It helps to all those people building new user experiences based on GNOME (no more #ifdef HILDON!) and also can lower the pressure that users with marginal or specially complex needs put sometimes on GNOME developers.

bryanwb

Anoche pudimos hacer la reunion entre la directora y responsables técnico de la Escuela Nº 20 de Vicente Lopez (en Villa Marteli), Caryl Bigenho integrante del grupo OLPC Support Volunter y Edward su esposo, y yo en representacion de SugarLabs Argentina.
La escuela es primaria, y se encuentra bastante bien equipada, contando con 16 computadoras nuevas (algunas aun estaban embaladas) y otras tantas mas viejas. Tambien hay un cañon proyectos e impresoras multifuncion.
La idea de la gente de la escuela es hacer una implementacion de Sugar con esas computadoras.
Yo propuse comenzar con uno o dos grados para poder enfocar los esfuerzos en conseguir material y actividades, a ellos les pareció bien y propusieron empezar con segundo grado ya que han tenido algunas experiencias previas el año pasado en primero.
Ellos nos enviaran los contenidos curriculares, y seria una buena idea ver que actividades o materiales se pueden usar y documentarlos.
Tambien les dije que podriamos hacer alguna reunion un sábado en la escuela y hacer un taller para los docentes.
Un punto importante a evaluar es ver cual seria la mejor opcion para que cada alumno pueda tener acceso a sus trabajos.
Actualmente no hay dinero para pen drives para implementar Sugar On a Stick y por otro lado el entorno social no permitiria que los chicos se llevaran los pens a sus casas, ademas la mayoria de los alumnos no tiene computadoras en las mismas.
Una idea que podria funcionar es instalar Linux con doble booteo en las maquinas y crear un usuario para cada alumno. Si los directorios home de los usuarios estuvieran en un servidor centralizado, podrian sentarse en cualquier maquina y al loguerase ver sus trabajos en el Journal. Si no deberian tener una lista de los usuarios que trabajan en cada maquina.
Personalmente me hubiera gustado que fueramos más representantes de SugarLabs Argentina, pero las cosas a las que me comprometí estan en linea con lo que hemos hablado en reuniones previas. La gente de las escuela tiene muy buena predisposicion, y capacidad técnica, por lo que creo que podremos llevar adelante una interesante prueba piloto, que era algo que deseabamos desde hace un tiempo.

If you have been following my blog, you may have noticed that I see Sugar Labs as having done a lot of progress recently in the sustainability front. This has been thanks to the efforts of several individuals, who gathered around Sugar Labs in the believe that computers could radically improve the educational opportunities of children anywhere in the world, and that none of the pre-existing software environments was the best suited for the task.

It has been an awesome adventure, maybe the biggest in my life, but time has come for me to move to less thrilling matters. This doesn't mean that I'm cutting completely with Sugar, just that it will take now just a small part of my free time. I intend to skim through a couple of mailing lists, to organize bi-weekly meetings for the development team, and to review patches in the queue of my modules as time permits. I'm aiming to dedicate to all this only 5 hours per week to Sugar matters, so I will have to be very strict on where this time is spent.

I'm starting just now to look for my next job, so if you know of a position for someone knowledgeable of the GNOME platform, Python, with a good sense of FOSS communities and a taste for diving into big codebases, please do forward to me at tomeu@tomeuvizoso.net. Here is my resume.

My last post listed some of the organizations that are putting some of their resources to work on Sugar with us. Though that list is complete to the best of my knowledge, there's another partner of Sugar Labs that is doing a great effort to work with others in improving educational opportunities around the world: OLE Nepal.

OLE Nepal is running a deployment of 4400 OLPC XOs and are working on content creation and teacher training along with laptop distribution and maintenance. They started by using Squeak Etoys as the platform for their materials, then switched to Flash because they couldn't find enough people with Squeak skills, and finally have launched the Karma project, which is based on HTML5 technologies.

They have released the 0.2 version and are now starting to port their existing content to Karma, some which you can see (and play!) here: http://karma.sugarlabs.org/.

I think this project is extremely relevant for the reasons that Bryan Berry outlines in Karma: The Code Less, Teach More Software Framework:

I have written a number of articles in olpcnews.com about the need for an activity framework built on openweb technologies (JavaScript, HTML). Here is the argument in three sentences. A large proportion of software developers are familiar with these technologies. This proportion is even larger in developing countries. The larger software industry is steadily embracing openweb technologies for web, mobile, and desktop development. Please note that Karma lessons can run both online and offline.

I don't know of any other effort that can compare to Karma in educational content authoring, so it strikes me as very bold and far-sighted that educational NGOs in developing countries are taking FOSS components and are assembling them to create frameworks that the Adobes and Microsofts of the world have failed to create. So kudos to OLE Nepal and all the volunteers involved!