Shared recently on our mailing list, Sugar Labs executive director Devin Ulibarri shares his dreams for the organization and how you can help us at this critical moment in our growth.
Hello,
Sugar Labs is at a critical inflection point. We need your support to leverage some important opportunities to grow. Consider donating to Sugar Labs as we move into our next phase.
I stepped into the executive director position in January of this year. I did so because I believe in Sugar Labs’s mission to create educational software and experiences for children. I also believe in its approach, giving kids the license to learn, through free/libre/open (FLO) source software, as well as the means to learn through its community of learners and teachers working together to create a fun, safe, and welcoming learn-by-doing environment. Based on my own experience as an educator for more than twenty years, I truly believe this organization has the potential to be a positive, disruptive force in education.
Sugar Labs has a history that dates back almost two decades, with methods (e.g. LOGO, constructionism, project-based learning) that date back more than half a century. Yet, as an independent nonprofit, the organization itself is basically a startup. Having left our former umbrella organization Software Freedom Conservancy in 2020, we must now take on the challenges inherent to growing our own organization. This independence brings challenges, such as finding stability and resilience. It also means, however, that we have an opportunity to build the kind of organization that truly serves our mission. I want to invite you to join us at this pivotal moment.
At the time of its founding more than sixteen years ago, Sugar Labs ran exclusively on one platform, created for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which was put into the hands of over three million children in over thirty-five countries. Since that time, Sugar Labs has strategically expanded its scope and renewed its relevance. One way that we’ve accomplished this is by making the platform available on more devices through Sugar on a Stick (SoaS), maintained as a Fedora “Spin,” and RaspberryPi (RPi) – the latter for which we made notable improvements over the summer. We also created web-based applications such as Turtle Blocks, Music Blocks, and Sugarizer, which can run on any computer, regardless of operating system. Music Blocks, in particular, has received recognition as an innovative tool for exploring music and programming. Perhaps most notably, the Japanese government provided two years of funding to create a version of Music Blocks specifically to help Japan’s elementary school students learn programming. Additionally, Music Blocks was also part of a large-scale deployment of seven-hundred thousand tablets by the Peruvian Ministry of Education.
This year I’ve spent time ensuring that our finances are stronger and more transparent than ever before. I did this so that charitable donations can be made with confidence, ultimately helping every financial contribution we receive go further. I won’t go into all the details here, but one thing I did is to update and publish our 990s to our website. All of our tax filings are now up to date and published on https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/ under “Our 990 tax filings.” I also helped Sugar Labs secure in-kind services that help our daily operations at no cost to us. This year, we received Open Source Credits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are helping us test and develop new educational software; we received over one-hundred terabytes of data storage through Google Workspace for nonprofits, and we received other in-kind services that are helping us run our organization more efficiently.
I also started a series of live events online where past and current contributors and students have a platform to tell their stories, as well as to invite guests from other organizations to discuss the future of technology-in-education. I did this because, although Sugar Labs’s impact is somewhat obvious to the many who are active in the community, I’ve found that there are still many untold stories from community members whose lives are impacted positively. As I’ve continued to speak to members of the community and published their stories, I’ve found that these previously untold stories continue to affirm the important role Sugar Labs plays in education. For example, in one of my interviews Ibiam Chihurumnaya, Ibiam shares how the Sugar Learning Platform and the Sugar community introduced him and his classmates to programming from a young age and has given him skills he continues to use to this very day.
As for our work this summer, Sugar Labs participated in our fourteenth Google Summer of Code (GSoC) to assist students to work on eleven projects. This, combined with our first-ever participation in Code4GovTech’s Dedicated Mentorship Program (DMP), advanced our software development, mentoring a total of fourteen students who worked an estimated five-thousand hours on projects spanning the gamut from Maintaining and Porting Twelve Activities to Flatpak, to creating new math games, to creating promising new generative-AI services for both teachers and learners. To get a better sense of all that we accomplished this summer, you are encouraged to watch the Finale series of students’ presentations on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@SugarlabsOrg-EN.
We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far this year. Yet, we know that we can do even more. For example, in order to publicly deploy the five generative-AI services we created this summer, we’ll need additional computational resources. We understand that using resources on “AI” may seem like a luxury at this point in time, but we’re persuaded that gen-AI will remain as a mainstay technology, and we owe it to our students to assist them in understanding and navigating this technology in a way that empowers them. Plus, we’ve already created prototypes, such as an assistant for lesson plan creation and a bot to assist with learning the basics of programming in Python, that we have found to be helpful for our students to learn and cultivate important skills and new ways of looking at the world. Just as we did when we created web-based software to run on any system or computer, we understand that we’ll need to offer learning opportunities in gen-AI in order to stay current and relevant in an ever-evolving landscape. That said, we haven’t compromised on our fundamental values. All of the services we created over the summer are licensed under a FLO license, allowing for freedom and full transparency so that learners can explore these systems at whatever level satisfies their curiosity. And, of course, we design our software so that students are empowered to create with these tools and build a portfolio of their work.
All of these projects are exciting for us, and we hope that you’re excited about them, too. However, in order to successfully implement all these projects–plus the myriad grants that I’ve written, and continue to write–we must expand our capacity as an organization. And, in order to increase our capacity, we need to raise funds to hire more staff.
I dream of the day that we have a team of at least ten staff dedicated to assisting schools with their deployments and curricula, conducting ongoing research on how our tools are being used, helping with ongoing software maintenance, and running daily operations. Having these sorts of resources would help us achieve learning outcomes for students and their teachers. And it would also free up our volunteer community to focus on what they love about Sugar Labs: working on innovative projects under knowledgeable mentors to build and learn new skills.
We have set an initial goal for this fall of $25k to grow in our second year of operations. Can you help us in this goal by contributing $3 or more? Your tax-deductible contribution will help us increase our capacity to continue to create innovative tools for learning, together with teachers and learners.
Donate today: https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=NEAV3YL4H6B5S
We are hopeful for the future in large part because we’ve accomplished so much in the past. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without the contributions of hundreds of supporters over the years, both financial and volunteer efforts. We continue to be a unique, positive community and a wonderful place where youth can solve authentic tasks and learn by doing. Looking toward the next three to five years, we want to amplify all the great things in our community – mentorship, learning software, emphasis on problem solving is welcome and encouraged. Your contribution can help us expand our reach, and it can help us do so much more.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading this message and thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Devin Ulibarri
Executive Director, Sugar Labs Inc.
P.S. Visit https://www.sugarlabs.org/donate/ to donate to, and support, our mission today!