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

Sugar Labs® is a volunteer-driven member project of a nonprofit corporation. Originally part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs® is supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate development.

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.

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. The "Projects" panel in the Sugar Labs wiki sidebar holds our premier projects. Please also see these project home pages:

Roadmap

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

  • Mission, Vision, Values
  • Distribution
  • Deployments
  • Quality Assurance
  • Infrastructure