Collaboration Central

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

Introduction

Presence
Mesh View

One of OLPC's core principles is Connection:

"The children in the neighborhood are thus permanently connected to chat, share information on the web, gather by videoconference, make music together, edit texts, read e-books and enjoy the use of collaborative games on line."

Sugar provides a collaboration framework for activities, which provides presence and data sharing.

This page is your guide to the state of Collaborative Activities on Sugar: developing them, using APIs and techniques, and assisting others in the development community.

Collaboration News

Announce new collaborative activities, new collaborative features in existing activities, or platform improvements for collaboration here.

14 April 2008:

• Presence Service API improved: Update.1 provides an improvement in the creation of Telepathy channels, allowing for the removal of some of the boilerplate code previously required for activities.
• Pippy gains simple collaboration: As of Pippy-20, joining a shared session gives you the contents of the owner's source buffer.
• Upcoming IRC meeting on collaboration: Sugar dev meeting#Thursday April 17 2008 - 17.00 (UTC)

Collaborative Activities

These activities have collaborative features:

Activity	Status	Comment
Browse	Shares bookmarks
Read	Shares PDF	Some sharing reliability issues
Write	abicollab sharing	Has a master-worker network topology which only works while the original sharer is in the shared activity. Good Point. Marc Maurer (uwog) has ideas on how to hand over the Master ownership for our web service backend. Feel free get in touch with him if you'd like to help out getting this to work on the telepathy/tubes backend.
Chat	XMPP IM chat	Uses Telepathy text channel, not Tubes, currently only works for a MUC, not 1-1 chats
Record	Shares photos, video, audio
TamTam	TamTam jam shares a drumbeat across the network
Etoys	Etoys has many modes of collaboration, including shared objects, shared desktop, push-to-talk, etc.
Calculate	Calculate shares variables over the network
Stopwatch	shares timers over the network
Measure	shares data streams over the network
Distance	uses network (and audio) to determine the distance between two laptops
Connect	two player game over the network
Memorize	multiplayer memory game also allows sharing of user-created games over the network

More to come...

Developer Resources

• Tutorials:

• Tubes Tutorial
• dbus-python tutorial

• HowTos:

• Designing your activity's D-Bus Tubes API

• Example activity: HelloMesh
• Developers manual
• Mailing list: sugar mailing list

Help Wanted / Offered

• If you need help with implementing collaboration, come to #sugar on IRC and talk to me. --morgs 08:32, 14 April 2008 (EDT)
• The Connect activity needs finishing. Patches welcome! --morgs 08:32, 14 April 2008 (EDT)

Meetings

• The Sugar developer meetings are a good opportunity to discuss collaboration needs and issues. Upcoming meetings are announced on the sugar mailing list.