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Sugar Digest

Kim Toufectis commented on my post about online services:

Appreciative of the ideals upon which SugarLabs and OLPC formed, it’s deeply troubling to envision a commercial entity like FaceBook integrated into the Control Panel.

For a system in which a proprietary browser (Opera) or plugin (Adobe Flash) are controversial even as optional add-ons, can we really be headed for integrating
a private corporation into the heart of the OS?This is very difficult to understand…

My response:

First, I will dodge the issue. The web-services intervention into the Sugar code base is not specific to any service provider, rather it is designed as a plug-in architecture. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say it is little more than the addition of four lines of code that add new destinations to the “Copy to” button in the Journal menu:

+       from jarabe.web import online_accounts_manager as oam
+       for account in oam.OnlineAccountsManager.configured_accounts():
+            menu = account.get_share_menu(metadata)
+            self.append(menu)

Raul and I added a new module to Sugar extensions that provides a general framework for managing and accessing online accounts, in a way that is service-provider agnostic, the online accounts manager imported from jarabe.web.

We are also working on a patch to the Journal detail view that will display comments made to shared entries. This is a generalization of a mechanism I built for the Sugar Portfolio activity, which displays comments made on Journal entries when your portfolio is shared using the existing Sugar collaboration framework.

Regarding the Facebook icon on the control panel shown in the sketch I posted, this is misleading. This is just a place holder. As I mentioned in my blog, we are working on a panel that can be used to manage all of a user’s online accounts, in a manner similar to GOA. (We may just use GOA with a Sugar wrapper, depending upon what dependencies it introduces.)

So far, I think it is fair to say we are not “integrating a private corporation into the heart of the OS”.

End of dodge.

There are several issues raised by our proposal (none of this code has yet been reviewed and accepted):

(a) Should Sugar facilitate integration with online services?
(b) If so, should we do it in such a way that is service-provider agnostic?
(c) Why specifically are we working on a Facebook plugin?

In regard to the first question, one could argue that the Sugar collaboration framework is capable of internalizing whatever services a user may want, and hence there is no reason to open the door to external services. Further, one could argue that the Sugar Browse activity provides sufficient access to online services that there is no need to provide any additional interfaces.

Personally, I don’t think it is realistic or pragmatic to try to contain our users or to replicate every service that might be of interest within our own framework. We don’t have the resources to do that, but even if we did, such an approach is not, in my opinion, aligned with the goals of the project. I want children to use Sugar as a “free as in freedom” and safe place to learn, however, I don’t want to confine them to that space: they should be launched out of Sugar into the broader world of computing and the web, hopefully shaped by their experiences with Constructionism and with free software. Indeed, one of the most rewarding experiences of the project is to watch children who grew up with Sugar submitting patches to reshape it into a something new and better. Just as we provide a mechanism to inter-operate between Sugar (an environment for exploration) and the GNOME desktop (an environment for productivity), I envision children learning to move fluidly between the garden of internal web services provided by our collaboration model and external services.

As far as being agnostic as to which services our framework *can* support, I think that from the technical perspective, this is a requirement. We cannot be in the business of censoring on behalf of our users. We leave decisions as to what to learn up to the local communities in which Sugar is deployed. Where we have a deliberate influence is on how it is learned. We try to strike a much-needed balance between consuming and creating, between critiquing and reflecting, and this is reflected in the affordances we provide: the Journal, view source, sharing, etc.

That said, we all make decisions of commission and omission. For example, on the one hand, I filled a ticket with Youtube regarding enabling the uploading of .ogv files. On the other hand, when I post videos, I use Dailymotion, because it supports .ogv. And yet I admit to still watching the occasional Youtube video. And as you alluded to in your question: we shipped Gnash instead of Adobe Flash.

Regarding social networking, I blogged this past spring about how the teachers using Sugar in Amazonas Peru hang out on Facebook. Consequently, when we set up a common space for collaboration and support for those teachers, we set it up on Facebook. I’ve tried to get teachers to come to the Sugar channel on IRC, but few, if any, ever do so. (The default channel of the IRC client we bundle into Sugar takes them to #sugar on irc.freenode.net, but they never use that tool. They do manage to find Facebook on their own using Browse.) If I want to engage with them, I need to go to where they hang out. The engagement itself, independent of the service used to provide it, has been rewarding.

As to why Facebook as the place to start building services, there are several reasons. The first is simply that Raul wrote facebook-gobject, which he hosted on git-hub, that allows you access Facebook’s Graph API via a set of GObject based objects for easy integration with GLib2-based code. The second is that Facebook has 1-billion users with whom we’d like to interact and impact.

There are certainly caveats: First, Facebook is not for children. My intention is to provide a mechanism for teachers, not children. Second, Facebook does not provide a place for file (project) sharing, just a place for talking about projects. We will need other services for that (dare I say, Google Drive). Third, there may well be other social networking sites that are aligned with the principles of Free Software. Help us identify those sites and write plugins for them. Which services are exposed in a control panel extension is not a decision we will make unilaterally, but in order to offer a service, someone needs to write the code. Raul and I are trying to lower the barrier to entry. Admittedly, by lowering the barrier for Facebook, we may be discouraging others from trying to compete in this space.

We have an obligation to take these issues seriously and to discuss them vigorously. They are not decisions that come easily or lightly. How we open the door to web services within Sugar is still to be decided.

Sugar Digest

1, Redwood City: Raul Gutierrez Segales, Bernie Innocenti and I have been busy hacking in a mini Sugar Camp this weekend. Our goal is to build an interface between the Sugar Journal and several on-line services. Specifically, Raul and I are working on an interface between the Journal and Facebook and Bernie is working on an interface between the Journal and Google Drive.

Here’s is where we are at at the moment:

• We have a control panel widget for managing your Facebook account. It saves a token in .gconf that can be used to make transactions with Facebook. (We plan to add a section to manage all of the users online accounts, probably in the manner of the GNOME online account manager. Suggests (and patches) welcome.)
• We have a “Share on” extension to the Journal palette menu. Right now, the only option is to share on Facebook. Raul has written a class that manages a Facebook object consisting of the Journal preview image, the title, and the description. The preview image is uploaded as a photo object to the Sugar Journal album on Facebook. The title and description are added as a comment. (Question for the design team: can we bump up the resolution of the preview image?)
• We are finishing up work on two extensions to the Journal detail-view toolbar for Journal entries with corresponding Facebook entries. The Refresh Button grabs comments from Facebook and adds them to the Object description. The Like Button grabs likes from Facebook.

We’ve also explored using Facebook graph objects, which would open up a number of interesting options, but we have some infrastructure and authentication issues to sort through before we go too far down that path.

We’ll be uploading patches (sugar) and (sugar-artwork) pretty regularly throughout the weekend.

2. I blogged about a cool visualization of prime factors last week. Tony Forster and I coded it up in Turtle Blocks. Quite fun. It uses a simple iteration to calculate the prime factors and then a recursive algorithm to render the factors in a tree, e.g., 25=5×5. It cycles through the factors of 2 through 100, but it is easy enough to change the main loop to cycle through whatever range of numbers you’d like. It takes advantage of the on-the-fly box definition mechanism in Turtle Blocks and the ability to reference a box from the value in another box to manage the state as it changes in the recursion. Note that you can vary the playback speed by moving the mouse up or down on the screen.

In the community

3. When visiting Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, we bumped into Chris Blizzard, formerly the Red Hat project manager for Sugar.

Sugar Labs

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Sugar Digest

There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those. –Nate Silver

1. Not to be deterred by Nate Silver’s words of warning, Claudia Urrea and I continue to work on mechanisms for visualizing learning Sugar. Along with the Pacita Pena and other members of the Learning Team, we have been designing rubrics that capture the level of fluency with the technology as well as the creative use of the individual Sugar tools by children. The rubrics are captured automatically in some Sugar activities, e.g., Turtle Art and a modified version of Write.  We are aiming for evaluations that look more broadly than those data that are captured by standardized tests. We just submitted a paper, “Visualizing Learning with Turtle Art”, in which we present some measurements calculated from 45 Turtle Art projects created by children working with Quirós Tanzi Foundation.

We claim that the rubric serves as a partial evaluation tool for open-ended projects. Partial, because it is only a measure of how the children used Turtle Art to express themselves, but not what they made or why they made it. But the rubric does have the potential to give some assistance to the teacher who is working within the context of accountability, without adding an additional burden of analysis above and beyond looking at the work itself.

We want children not just to learn about the computer, but also to learn with the computer. Providing activities such as Turtle Art that engage them in computational thinking in the context of personal expression is necessary, but not sufficient. Giving them tools for reflection enhance the learning experience. Giving their teachers simple-to-use mechanisms for assessment increase the odds that activities like Turtle Art will find more mainstream acceptance. Making it easier to assess open-ended projects lowers one of the barriers that are preventing more use of the arts in school.

2. Google Code-In ended last week. We had 52 contestants working on almost 200 tasks supported by 22 mentors. On February 4, Google will announce the two winners from Sugar Labs. But in the meantime, I want to thank everyone who participated and thank Google for this opportunity for outreach. Chris Leonard, the co-administrator from Sugar Labs, has made a page in the Sugar Labs wiki summarizing the accomplishments of our students. Worth checking out.

3. Sean Daly, our PR guru, is back with a vengeance. We are planning to make some noise around Google Code In, the up-coming Sugar 1.0 release, and many other accomplishments in order to broaden our community of contributors and users. Please contact Sean if you have themes we should consider promoting.

4. Belated thanks to Luke Faraone for once again doing a great job running the Sugar Labs oversight board election.

5. I just released Turtle Blocks v170. It has a number of enhancements and bug fixes with help from the usual gang: Cynthia Solomon, Tony Forster, Alan Aguiar, Jeff Elkner, and Luke Faraone. Among other changes, the color model is improved: its three-dimensional nature is exposed more consistently and the color blocks, rather than just setting hue, set hue, shade, and gray, which eliminates some confusion caused by the black and white blocks. The other major change is a change from using a .ta suffix to a .tb suffix. (.ta files will still be recognized, but .tb makes more sense for Turtle Blocks and it makes the distinction between Turtle Art and Turtle Blocks more apparent.)

I added a few more sample projects, including an ambition project (640 blocks), game-trianglepaint.ta. The inspiration comes from a simple paint program that Brian Silverman wrote in Javascript and that Lionel Laske has packaged for Sugar. The Turtle Blocks version is not really usable as a paint program, but it does work and it exposes a lot of different ideas that will hopefully inspire some up and coming young hackers.

Finally, out of the blue, yet another third party Turtle Blocks plugin has appeared. The Logic plugin was written by Roman Pollak. It adds more bitwise operations to Turtle Blocks, such as AND, OR, XOR, NOT, logical shift left, logical shift right. Nice to see that people are using the plugin mechanism. We should consider generalizing it for all activities.

In the community

5. Tincho (Martin Abente) wrote with an update on the Sugar developer course he is teaching in Asuncion. You can follow the progress at CursoSugar2013. Tincho told a “funny story” that says a lot about the Sugar community and Free Software:

Today one of my students was really impressed by this 14ish years old hacker (Ignacio from Uruguay) wanting to help him with his assignment (look at Grupo 2 assignment). He said something like “I just can’t believe it, where did he came from”, he just could not believe someone (a kid) from another country contacted him just to help him, out of nowhere haha…

I wrote back to let him know that Ignacio is only 13!
6. Gerald Ardito was accepted to present his work developing the Regents Living Environment curriculum into a self-directed learning experience at a Educational Media conference in British Columbia this summer.

7. I am after-dinner speaker at the 25th anniversary of the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference, a conference I used to frequent quite often, before I distracted by One Laptop per Child and Sugar. My topic will be the many ways in which human visual and electronic imaging influenced both the design of the XO and the Sugar user experience. Should be fun.

Tech Talk

8. Cool visualization of the week. Anyone want to code this up?

9. Daniel Francis has been working on a tool to run Sugar Build on distributions that cannot be directly supported by Sugar Build by creating a virtual Ubuntu environment and building Sugar within it. Very cool.

10. Satellit (Thomas Gilliard) reported that we have a Sugar image for Raspberry PI.

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Sugar Digest

1. We have a newly elected Sugar Labs oversight board. Joining us are Claudia Urrea, Gonzalo Odiard, and Daniel Francis. Continuing are Adam Holt, Chris Leonard, Gerald Ardito, and Walter Bender. It is a nice group — quite diverse — which will bring some new perspectives to the board. Departing are Chris Ball, Aleksey Lim, and Sebastian Silva. All three will be missed: Chris’s calm, thoughtful guidance, Aleksey’s cool insight into the needs of developers and also the reminder that our mission is broader than just our current collection of tools, and Sebastian, who lives and breathes on the ground of Sugar deployments, and has well represented their needs. I hope that our departing members will continue to participate as non-voting contributors to our discussions and I also am very grateful for everything they have contributed in the past.

2. Two more weeks of Google Code In. It has really been fun trying to keep pace with all of these new contributors to Sugar. If you have ideas for “tasks”, it is not too late to add more. Please contact me or Chris Leonard.

3. 2012 is coming to an end, a natural time to reflect on where we have been and where we are going.

From the technical perspective, Sugar 0.96 and 0.98, which include the port to GTK3 and support for touch are important milestones. The tireless work of the development team under the leadership of Simon Schampijer have really born fruit. They have guaranteed the stability Sugar on GNU/Linux for the forseeable future. (A tip of the hat to Martin Langhoff and OLPC Association, who generously supported Simon and the much of the devel team in 2012.) Their work will be featured as the OLPC XO4 is unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) early next month.

From the learning perspective, through the participation Claudia and the Learning Team, we made a lot of headway on the understanding how Sugar is used and how it can be used to more have more impact on learning. Their work on “making learning visible” has both academic merit and practical implications for the learner.

From the user perspective, we continue to expand our user base, both in terms of new deployments and new platforms. In 2012, we made renewed headway in the US market, with projects in Miami, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina (sponsored by the Knight Foundation). On the other side of the globe, Barry Vercoe has launched a program in New Zealand. Meanwhile, existing programs, such as those in Nicaragua and Paraguay, continue to expand. In Argentina, while the growth of OLPC has been slow, the growth of Sugar on other platforms is steadfast. While it is difficult to track where it is being used, the number of visits to the Sugar-on-a-Stick download page is >> 600,000.

We have also grown our developer community. Of particular note is that the next generation contributors is in large part coming from Sugar users. Daniel, Agustin, Christofer, Ignacio, Rafael, and others whom Flavio Danesse has been mentoring in Uruguay have become central to the Sugar development process. They have realized our goal of having real responsibility for learning and the tools for learning lie in the hands of the learners themselves. This is an unprecedented accomplishment for which the Sugar Community should be proud. Sugar Labs participation in Google Code-in is icing on the cake. We’ve got >50 new youth contributors since the contest began in November.

From the point of view of localization and internationalization, the highlights of 2012 are the progress we have made in Aymara and Quechua. Edgar Quispe and Irma Alvarez have done wonders. (A tip of the hat to Chris Leonard and Aymar Ccopacatty for their help and support.) Barry Vercoe has personally funded work on Maori and we have had much progress on several indigenous languages in Mexico. Meanwhile, Chris has made numerous contributions upstream, both by hosting some upstream projects on our Pootle server, but also by being a strong voice and advocate within the glibc and pootle communities.

More technical highlights include the work of Daniel Narvaez on sugar-build, which provides a much more stable development environment than the unwieldy sugar-jhbuild environment. Under the shepherding of Peter Robinson and Tom Gilliard, Sugar on a Stick and our virtual machine support continue to improve in quality and stability. Aleksey, Sebastian, and Laura Vargas have made contributions to enhance our ability to support off-line deployments with their work on the Sugar Network. The work by Team Butia on expanding Sugar into the sphere of robotics continues to impress me and the work of Guzman Trindad and Tony Forster, integrating Sugar into the world of rich sensing, provides endless pleasure.

Another highlight, seemingly innocuous, was the creation of the Amazonas page in Facebook. This simple use of social media to provide a support network for teachers in one of the most isolated places on earth has exceeded my expectations. It has three times as many members as had attended the workshop in Chachapoyas, and it has daily updates of projects, questions, and progress. The recent work by Raul Gutierrez on integrating Turtle Art with Facebook is a harbinger of how we might make sharing of the Sugar experience more seamless in 2013.

Personally, my biggest thrill in 2012 was working with children, in Miami and in Khairat (India). I had a chance to teach Turtle Art workshops and in both cases, the children did dance animations that were impressive in their depth.

So what is next? In 2013 we will see the fruit of some of our efforts, including a chance to see Sugar with touch in the field. OLPC Australia will be the first deployment of the OLPC XO4. It will be interesting to learn what impact it has in the classroom. One thing we already know is that touch makes Sugar more accessible to younger (pre-K) children. It also is congruent with the expectations of children coming of age in the tablet/smart-phone era.

Daniel has been working on revitalizing our automated testing suite, which will help with maintenance and QA.

We will see advances in localization. Already, the Ministry of Education in Peru has opened a bid to follow up on the work of Edgar and Irma. Translation of other language groups is also being advanced.

The topic of support for Special Needs was raised numerous times in 2012. I hope to convene the various interested parties in early 2013 to lay out a new road map for Sugar in this area. (The work on GTK3 has helped in that we know have, for example, an on-screen keyboard. And by eliminating Hippo, we have removed the last vestiges of Sugar that were preventing us from using the GNOME tools.)

Perhaps these themes will be the focus of Sugar 1.0, due to be released in Q2 2013. A few things queued up include setting a background image on the Home View (thanks to Agustin Zubiaga) and multiple Home Views (thanks to Daniel Francis).

I also expect that we will be seeing more learning guides in 2013, a harbinger of which was pulled together for the Charlotte deployment: teachers sharing best practice.

There are two elephants in the room: The Cloud and Android. How we face these opportunities will certainly become more clear in 2013.

I hope to organize a Global Sugar conference in 2013. Perhaps at MIT or perhaps at a deployment. It is time to bring our community together face to face on a larger scale.

Finally, in 2012, I wrote a book about the OLPC story, which includes a chapter on Sugar, but I need to write a more complete story about Sugar, its goals and its impact. I am setting that as a personal goal for 2013.

In the community

4. Rita Freudenberg announced that a new Etoys book is available: Learning with Etoys  Imagine, Invent, Inspire.

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Sugar Digest

1. Google Code-In continues at a rapid pace. So far, we have 49 participants working on more than 170 tasks (we continue to add more tasks as the contest progresses over the next four weeks). Students have done a great job with documentation, for example, there is now a chapter in ‘Make Your Own Sugar Activity that describes how to port from GTK2 to GTK3, a video introduction to Sugar on a Stick, and a new Turtle Art introductory guide. They have do a lot of coding: contributions such as setting the background image on the homepage; improvements to activities (1, 2). If you have suggestions for projects–easy or hard–please don’t hesitate to contact me.

2. We are entering the oversight board election season. We have a nice diversity of candidates to choose from this year, including some of our key developers (one of whom has been instrumental not only in writing code, but also in mentoring other developers and one whom grew up with Sugar, bringing us the perspective of the Sugar user); a pedagogist who has been leading a weekly on-line discussion about Sugar with teachers and thought leaders (3, 4, 5); a rabble rouser; and two current members running for re-election. Ballots will be issued in the next day or two. Please vote.

3. It is beautiful and free (libre).

In the community

4. Explore a nice collection of Sugar Activity lesson plans for 1st through 5th grade designed for the OLPC Charlotte deployment.

5. Thanks to an initiative by Maria Elena, Sugar will be featured in a summer course of the Polytechnic Faculty at UNA. Martin Abente will be teaching the course.

6. What fun: Mike Lee read my book, Leaning to Change the World, on his XO.

Tech Talk

7. The latest from Guzmán Trindad: physics using TurtleBlocks and Butia (6, 7).

8. Bug fixes continue to come in for Sugar 0.98.

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Activities/Turtle_Art/Using_Turtle_Art_Sensors#Voltage-current_relationship

Sugar Digest

“Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.”
(Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.)–André Gide

It has been a very exciting week. (You may have noticed, I don’t often use adverbs, but very was called for given all that has been accomplished.)

1. Simon Schampijer announced the release of Sugar 0.98. This is a major milestone for Sugar Labs as it is the first release that takes touch seriously. It also incorportates many improvements to the GTK3 port. The Sugar Developer Team deserves a resounding celebatory cheer of thanks for a their effort.  (Note that OLPC has been incorporating Sugar 0.98 in their 13.1 series of builds, available for download to run on XO hardware.)

2. Google Code-In began on Monday. We have 22 mentors, 40 students, and 80 out of 132 tasks already completed. (More tasks are coming on-line soon.) The contest runs for 6 weeks, so it is not too late to sign up as a mentor and to recruit students to participate. Some highlights include new tutorials for Turtle Art, using Sugar in a Virtual Machine, and using Sugar on a Stick; a new feature: load a background image on the home screen; and numerous patches in support of internationalization. Some of the usual suspects are making their usual outstanding contributions, while some new talent is also emerging. Thanks to everyone (mentors, students, and Google) for participating.

3. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please contact me or the membership committee with any questions *before* 7 December.

Tech Talk

4. Aleksey Lim announced the Sugar Network 0.7 development release.

Sugar Labs

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Sugar Digest

1. Google Code-In begins tomorrow. It is not too late to sign up as a mentor and to recruit students to participate. While many of the tasks involve programming, there are also documentation, design, and research tasks. This is a great opportunity for Sugar Labs to recruit its next generation of developers.

2. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please feel free to contact me or the membership committee with any questions before 7 December.

Tech Talk

3. Daniel Narvaez has made a number of improvements to sugar-build, which has by-and-large replaced sugar-jhbuild as the preferred development environment for Fedora and Ubuntu.

Sugar Labs

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Sugar Digest

1. Sugar Labs has been selected as one of ten projects to participate in Google Code In. We join, among others, our colleagues at Fedora et al., in soliciting the participation of high-school (and in our case, middle-school) students to work on projects during a six-week sprint beginning on November 26. This is a great chance for the youth who have been so instrumental in our growth over the past year to show off their talents to the world (and two of them will hopefully win a trip to visit Google). Please help Chris Leonard and me finalize the project and mentor lists over the next few days. (We are offering coding projects, documentation and training projects, outreach, quality assurance, and user interface, so even if you are not a developer, you likely have some skills to devote to the Code In.

NOTE TO MENTORS: Please create an account and fill out the Request to be a Mentor form.

NOTE TO COMMUNITY: Please add to our task lists and please recruit participants.

2. I am in transit back to Boston from a three-day trip to Chihuahua, Mexico. I gave a lecture on Sugar at Campuslink 2.0, the annual tech conference at UACH. I had a lot of fun with the faculty and students and even managed to squeeze in a short tutorial on hacking Sugar on my way to the airport this morning. I am looking forward to growing participation in the Sugar community. (Note to CJL: they are very interested in providing Rarámuri language support for Sugar.)

3. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. In anticipation of the election, I urge you to sign up for membership in the Sugar community. You need not be a software developer to join: contributions come in many forms, including: teaching, documenting, promoting, supporting, etc. (Note: there is no membership fee.) So, if you are not already a member, please sign up before 23 November.

“If you’re wondering whether you meet the requirements, if you’re a teacher using Sugar in your classroom, regularly reading mailing lists, or have discussed Sugar in IRC, you probably do.”

If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please feel free to contact me or the membership committee with any questions before 7 December.

4. Irma Alvarez has completed Fructose (and Dextrose) translations of Sugar into Quechua. Next up: the Honey strings.

In the community

5. The python-joven (Python youth) community has been busy. A number of Sugar and GNOME-related workshops were given last week:

• Introduction to Gtk 3 (Ignacio Rodriguez and Flavio Danesse)