Sugar Labs

ABOUT US

Sugar Labs:

a community for learning and software-development

The Sugar development platform is available under the free/libre software GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it. “Sugar Labs” is a registered USA 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, not-for-profit organization, which serves as a support base and gathering place for the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications.

MISSION

About Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs® is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a global mission to create educational opportunities in technology to youth around the world. Volunteer mentors and contributors work together to develop activity-focused software for children. All software is developed with learning as the primary goal, necessitating the need for source code to be published publicly for study, licensed under a Free/Libre license for explicit permission to share and remix, and openly worked upon within a community where students are invited to make contributions, under guidance of experienced mentors. Donations to support the work of Sugar Labs can be made at https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/.

PRINCIPLES

In order for Sugar to be successful, it needs the participation of a large number of people who share common goals while maintaining independence, so that each participant has the ability to act independently. For these reasons, Sugar Labs subscribes to the principles described here, which are the author's own translation of an original text in Spanish.

Identity

1. Clear mission – Fully disclosed objectives.
2. Declared commitments – Affinities and aversions explained.
3. Declared outside connections – Relationships with other organizations explicitly listed.

Structure

1. Horizontal organization – Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
2. Identified contributors – Who is who, people are reachable.
3. Clear responsibilities – Who is in charge of what.
4. Activities described – All of the ongoing work is acknowledged.

See Wiki Structure for a guide to how the wiki models Sugar Labs' structure.

Operation

1. Open participation – Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
2. Meritocracy – Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on one's skills, results, and contributors’ support.
3. Voluntary (non-)engagement – Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.

Information

1. Regular reports – Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
2. Information accessible – Even internal operational information is available by default.
3. Explicit confidentiality – It is explained what matters are confidential, why, and who can access them.

We try to operate en plein air.

Goods

1. Economic model – Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed. (Please see/contribute to the discussion here.)
2. Resources – Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
3. Public accounts – It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.

A special thanks to our contributors.

GOALS

Education Goals

Sugar is useful only to the extent it is used by the learning community. Thus, Sugar Labs is working with educators around the world to focus on these learning challenges:

To make Sugar and Sugar activities freely and readily available to learners everywhere.
To explore and share best practices.
To provide a forum for discussion and support for technology for learning.
To provide mechanism for evaluation and dissemination of results.

Technical Goals

Sugar supports the notions that learners should “share by default” and be able to “explore, express, debug, and critique.” Thus Sugar puts an emphasis on “activities” rather than “applications.” The foundation will focus on solving the challenges that are relevant to these aspects of the interface, namely:

To make it “simple” to share Sugar activities. This will require an architecture that allows discovery of activities.
To create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems and on multiple hardware platforms. It should be “simple” to install Sugar everywhere. Specifically, it means packaging for every distribution and every virtual machine—removing hardware-related dependencies wherever possible.
To make it “simple” to write Sugar activities. This necessitates stable APIs and example code that uses these APIs.
To make Sugar activities even more secure. Our principal user community is comprised of children; they must be protected from malware, phishing, botnets, etc.

Community Goals

Sugar Labs is here to support community innovation, entrepreneurship, and enterprise. Sugar Labs would like to help community members start projects that help sustain and grow the Sugar technology and learning communities:

To provide local and regional technical and pedagogical support.
To create new learning activities and pedagogical practice.
To provide localization and internationalization of software, content, and documentation.
To provide integration and customization services.

Projects

Sugar Labs is working on a few projects focused on delivering specific goals in a defined time period. Below are some of our premier projects:

Sugar on a Stick

A portable version of Sugar that can run from a USB stick without installation.

Summer of Code

A program where students collaborate on open-source projects under expert mentorship.

Roadmap

The Sugar Community roadmap is used to guide our community efforts:

Mission, Vision, Values
Distribution
Deployments
Quality Assurance
Infrastructure

Sugar Labs: a community for learning and software-development