Sugar Labs Talk and Gnome Three Dot Love

Today Walter Bender and one of his Italian colleagues (sorry, I didn't get the name :( ) from Sugar Labs had a talk about Sugar and Sugar Labs in Bozen at TIS innovation park (right there where the Speck Hackfest has been some months ago).


(me on the left and karl on the right checking out Sugar on the OLPC)

It was exciting to hear what the ideas behind Sugar are and how the project evolved. The talk had some classical FOSS elements in it as well, education and voting machines have to be open source!

It was sad that there haven't been many people. Lets make some publicity for the next FOSS event in South Tyrol, probably some folks from South Tyrol (and surroundings) are reading this or some other folks are willing to combine a vacation in South Tyrol (beautiful, I promise ;) ) with a FOSS event.

The FOSS event I'm talking about is called Open Source Success Story NAGIOS and is going to happen on April 29th :). You can find more information on the homepage of TIS innovation park or here.

One thing that made me go to Walter Benders talk was Vincent Untz mail earlier this day about Gnome 3.0! Will Gnome follow Sugars example and build a "activities based" desktop? One key element of Sugar and the OLPC is the Journal. Its pretty much what we've heard in a keynote during last years GUADEC in Istanbul...remember?

I think its definitely time for the desktop to move on. That was a part of Walter Benders talk too, that the desktops we use nowadays have been build/designed/inveted to fit the needs of some office workers in the 80's or even earlier! Things have changed, the desktop has to change as well! We have to develop solutions for the problems we have, and not fight with old solutions to fit our purposes as well. Thats exactly what Sugar has done. They wanted to create a simple user interface which helps kids to learn, to explore, to have fun and they have done exactly that. I've heard some people say: "Sugar is not intuitive at all". Well that might be right, but Sugar has been developed to be explored by kids. It's part of the deal to find out alone how it works. If kids can handle it, our parents and we will be able to handle it too don't we?