XOCamp 2

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A miniconference is being held from Start date::November 17, 2008 - End date::November 21, 2008 in Has location city::Cambridge, Has location country::USA to help frame our long-term software development effort. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements, features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software Release 9.1.0 and the Sugar 0.84 release. It will probably be similar to XOcamp 1 in nature.

P.S. - We need donations to help get developers to the conference! See XOcamp 2/Fundraising for details.

Subject Matter

Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but are not limited to:

  • Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews of available feedback
  • Learning priorities and tools needed to support them
  • Technologies, applications and software design proposals
  • Process and infrastructure proposals
  • Current and needed research

Agenda

This is a very early proposed agenda : please feel free to edit and improve it! 

Mon 17 : Agenda review, scope and expectations setting.  
  revisiting core vision and goals
  8.2.1 v 9.1 v 0.84  |  this year v Future releases
  xo+sugar            |  OLPC & sugarlabs collaboration & process
  initial feedback    |  introspection on feedback received to date, surprises, concerns
  initial roadmap     |  the 'before' of the b&a, a review of current goals

Tue 18 : country feedback review; brainstorming and open sessions
  see proposed session ideas below
  feedback & review   |  feedback from schools, teachers, facilitators, reporters
  country nutshells   |  overview of the status of many partner countries  

Wed 19 : brainstorming, open sessions, technical discussions and presentation of proposals

Thu 20 :    "    "   

Fri 21 : review, roadmap updates, wrapup & next steps
  summarize actionable items, publish week in review
  gather feedback from the week, update the 9.1.0 and Future roadmaps
  final roadmap       |  the 'after' of the b&a, updating 6 month and Future goals
  
Sat+   : report, writeup.  
  reflection for the next miniconf; thoughts for Jan's community conference
  report sections for : devs [dev/sugar], upstreams [list], deployments, educators, testers?

Proposals

Propose talks below and list your name below talks you'd like to see.

To add a proposal, please use the following format: 

* '''TITLE''' - description - presenter [if you have one in mind]
Title - please make this as short as possible while being precise.
Description - this should be 20-100 words long. Please leave longer descriptions on a separate page dedicated to the subject.
Presenter- If you can present on the topic, include your name. If you are suggesting someone else as presenter, add a question mark after their name unless they have confirmed they can lead the session, and notify them of your interest.

User and Country Requirements Definition

Who is using XOs, for what; what are their main problems and delights, where are they sharing thoughts & requests? Cross-prioritization needed : building local developer groups v. building connections with them v. solving their immediate problems.

We should have presentations or slides from as many deployment with an active team or a significant # of laptops as we can, to help organize their needs, see what work they are doing on their own and work on where there is overlap. Perhaps this can be one afternoon, with a wrapup to bring the results of the various sessions together. The goal is to come up with a prioritized list of requirements and challenges which should be addressed by XO software.
Gregorio 12:54, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Programs at scale

Country nutshells (also see deployment status on Deployments page):

  1. Ethiopia
  2. Haiti
  3. Rwanda
  4. Mongolia
  5. Birmingham
  6. Nepal
  7. Paraguay
  8. India
  9. Australia & Oceania
  10. More (Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, China, NY/IL, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique)



  • Who is the user and what do they want?

A summary of user input from deployment leads, students and teachers. An aggregated look at the top items requested. An in depth look at the motivation of a few specific requests. Time permitting, can include a discussion of how to turn user feedback in to actionable requirements. Can include a detailed "use case" explaining the technical environment and social context of a target school. Gregorio 19:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)


General topics

  • Annotation - storing general annotations for documents and other works. Formats, tools, Sugar/Journal integration. - ???
  • Book reading - reading texts : interface[s] for reading, bookmarking, annotating; combining readers for different formats; models to follow. - [sayamindu?]
  • Searching - there are various places where one searches for information in daily use of an XO. Improvements to search (in the journal, in sugar views, in browse) are discussed
    • ..
  • i8n and l10n: 9.1 and beyond: The areas I would like to cover include:
    • Input methods: Out current input system (XKB) is not enough for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, and even existing customers like Ethiopia have needs which are met with considerable difficulty with XKB. For 9.1, I propose that we switch to SCIM[1], which should take care of most (if not all) of our current requirements.
    • Multiple, non English fallback languages: Many of our users will probably be multilingual. A Aymara speaker would like to see the UI strings falling back to Spanish translations in absence of Aymara instead of the normal, default English. We have the existing infrastructure in our core i18n infrastructure, implementing this is simply a matter of making changes in Sugar (and maybe Rainbow).
    • Language packs: The current system of language packs is not very reliable (it overwrites the original translations in the system, installations cannot be easily undone, no versioning, etc). I want to switch to a RPM based language pack system for 9.1, which will be easier to deploy (especially if the customization key mechanism gets support for RPM). This will require support for multiple locale directories, and I'll talk about that as well (Ubuntu uses a similar approach - I plan to reuse their patches if possible).
    • User modifiable translations: There has been a number of ideas on this - initially (during my last visit to 1CC), we were thinking of a "Translate Activity" which would let children add/modify translations, and optionally let them share the translations over the mesh. SJ and Scott have recently suggested a wiki-like editable UI, which would, definitely be much cooler ;-). I want to brainstorm on this, and try to figure out the amount of time we need to do this, the advantages, risks, tradeoffs involved etc.
    • Presenter: Sayamindu
  • Multiplayer wikipad - sharing a namespace of versioned editable docs. MikMik update. - [Mako?]
  • Customizing skins - setting desktop themes and backgrounds is another quick rewarding way to feel ownership of one's system
    • ..
  • School Server
    • --User:Walter - It would be great to get a status report (from Martin?) and set expectations as to what services we can expect to leverage within the XO/Sugar ecosystem.
  • Customization, Imaging, and Activating XOs
    • --User:Reuben and/or User:Kim-A discussion of where we are now. What current deployments are doing. How we can make this better.
  • Automated testing tools
    • --User:Mchua and/or the QA team (Kim, Joe, Frances) - what tools are being used now and where to find howtos on using them, what tools would you like to see made/improved, how should test automation fit within our develop/test/release workflow, what testing tools can be developed and/or run by the community.
  • How does support work today - what can we do to make it better/easier?
    • --User:Kimquirk, User:Reuben, and/or User:Mchua How our deployment tech support structure work for "official" large deployments for both 1cc tech support, developers, 1cc interns, in-country deployment tech teams and those they serve, the volunteer community at large, and others? Once we have established those processes and roles, how can we prepare the various groups/people to use them?
  • Power management

Not sure who can present this but I think we should definitely cover it. Possible areas include: no power usage regressions, testing for power against real world usage, power save modes and ensuring they meet expectations for all use cases, SW design, APIs, hardware overview including areas/chips which can be optimized for power. Any takers for any of those? Maybe GNU... Gregorio 16:52, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

See also thread on power at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020538.html

  • View source key everywhere

Thread from Tomeu at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020576.html

  • Report Cards on XO

See thread started by Yama on Devel: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/009472.html see also related submitting homework thread started by Mikus: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020436.html

Sugar

  • Fixing & featuring activities - process and progress about activity updates; from maintainer pinging (newsreader, paint) to regular activity-review (gcompris sets, simcity). Similarly, publicizing partly-finished activities (shikhar's email, b-logo).
  • Next-generation journal ideas
    • --User:CScott (I can give a talk)
    • --User:Walter (I"d like to talk about portfolios--possibly a closely related topic)
  • Interoperation with legacy apps
    • --User:CScott (I can give a talk on this topic, but others may be more qualified)
  • Printing -- XS runs CUPS, XO prints to XS, profit! discuss
  • Libraries -- can libraries be more than static content? can they be merged with activity bundles?
  • Performance -- System-level performance tweaks for UI responsiveness.
  • Compatibility with desktop applications - Marco Pesenti Gritti
  • Top five performance problems - Marco Pesenti Gritti
  • Web based activities - Marco Pesenti Gritti
  • Files
  • Shutdown - The power button is currently underutilized. It should allow either shutdown or suspend of the laptop, with the help of an on-screen dialog or menu. - User:pgf

Networking

  • Network principles -- how do we find others and collaborate with them?
  • Asynchronous internet --- offline caching and browsing, library integration?
    • --User:CScott (I can make a brief proposal; I'd like to hear others present)
  • Link local presence/collaboration -- improving serverless presence and collaboration including integration of Cerebro
    • --User:Morgs (I can facilitate discussion - need Poly and Collabora's participation)
  • Server presence/collaboration improvements -- improving XMPP server based presence and collaboration including Gadget
    • --User:Morgs (I'd like to see Collabora talk about Gadget implementation and deployment)
  • Removing sugar-presence-service -- Collabora proposed a complexity reduction by moving PS into Sugar
    • --User:Morgs (I'd like to see Collabora's ideas presented)
  • File or Journal Object Sharing -- Ability to transfer information for distribution or asynchronous collaboration
    • --User:Morgs (This too needs a discussion with several participants. It might not make 9.1.0 but we need to plan for it.)
  • Collaboration

-- Synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, definition and requirements.
An idea for achieving greater scale for synchronous collaboration by using centralized management and groups.
An explanation of how asynchornous collaboration can be used. A discussion of the lessons learned from the EduBlog and Amadis experiences and consideration of the applicability of Moodle.
Gregorio 19:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Linux

  • Filesystems -- replacing jffs2
    • --User:CScott (I hope Deepak can give a talk on this topic)
  • Updates -- Updating faster/better for 9.1
  • Fedora 10
    • -- entered by Gregorio 16:14, 28 October 2008 (UTC) Not sure who can present. Main topic is what will it take to get to Fedora 10, what are the benefits and costs.

Security

  • Theft-deterrence -- what are we doing, what can we do better
  • Isolation and untrusted (versions of) activities

Activities and Applications

  • Activity compatibility

Making it easy to run Fedora Linux apps on the XO. (intro on requirements by me but discussion of technical feasibility and options must be presented by someone else). Gregorio 19:28, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

  • Flash, options for better performance and compatibility

Needs presenter (maybe Wad?). Gnash update and status, hardware acceleration issues between AMD and Adobe, other performance issues, options for full Flash plugin, playing YouTube. Gregorio 16:55, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

  • Media players, video and audio

Needs presenter. Possibly related to Flash above. Technical options for greater media players. Mplayer, video and audio sites and codecs. Performance, codecs and compatibility. Gregorio 16:55, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

  • What does an electronic textbook look like?

Since the 1960s there have been experiments in high-powered educational software, but not a lot of textbook development that integrates this software into the text, and very little classroom experience. This session will look at the available materials, the types of software and content available, and the implications for future curricula.

What do we know? What examples do we have and what do they show us? What opportunities can we see? How do we make this happen? What questions should we ask next?

Examples:

  • Edison Talking Typewriter to teach reading and writing to pre-school children
  • Ken Iverson's textbooks, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus
  • Smalltalk and the Dynabook concept
  • Matlab, Mathematica, and other powerful software
  • Notebook and workspace formats and capabilities
  • Teaching programming to children: Smalltalk, Logo, APL, others

Submitted by Ed Cherlin

Interfacing with Wetware

  • Teacher Training

It would particularly be interesting to hear about actual experience, success stories, failures, best practices, cultural / ideological issues...

If I had a chance to present, I would want to talk about "the medium is the message: Using XOs to Train in Using XOs" Yamaplos 19:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

  • Getting to Countrywide Saturation

Lessons from winning >$100M customers at Cisco. The business and technical steps to rolling out 3,500 Rack Units of hardware. e.g. RFI, RFP, RFQ, lab trial, field trial, transitioning from architecture team to production team, ongoing technical and operational customer maintenance. Gregorio 15:18, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

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