[Sur] Sugar Digest 2017-10-10

[Walter Bender]

1. I just completed our application for Sugar Labs participation in Google
Code-in (GCI) 2017. As most of you know, GCI is a programming contest for
youth ages 13-17 hosted by Google. Sugar Labs has participated the past 5
years. It is a great opportunity to work with young programmers, many of
whom continue to contribute to Sugar Labs long after the contest ends (in
fact, my co-administrator this year, Ignacio Rodriguez, is a former GCI
participant.) We should know by the end of the month if we are accepted
into the program this year.

If we accepted, we will need to accumulate tasks for the contest, which can
include bug fixes, activity and feature development, design, outreach,
documentation, and research. Please contact either Ignacio or me if you
have interest in being a GCI mentor or if you have ideas for GCI tasks. See
[1] for more details.

2. James Cameron has announced the release of Sugar 0,112. This new stable
release of Sugar is largely a maintenance release; it includes some bug
fixes and new translations. Please see [2] regarding the details. Thanks to
James as well as Besnik Bleta, Chris Leonard, Eduard Sanou, Ezequiel
Pereira, Gonzalo Odiard, György Balló, Hrishi Patel, Ignacio Rodríguez,
Manash Raja, Sam Parkinson, Sanchit Kapoor, and Utkarsh Tiwari.

3. In anticipation of Sugar 0.112, I managed to get wrappers around Turtle
Blocks JS [3] and Music Blocks [4] so that they can be run inside Sugar
itself.

4. Jatin Dhankhar and Sam Cantero are making headway on ASLOv3 [5, 6], a
new version of the Sugar Labs activity portal, which promises to be easier
to use and maintain. Hopefully we'll have the new server running before GCI
begins.

5. There are still a few more days left to vote in the Sugar Labs oversight
board election. If you did not receive your ballot, please contact the
members and election committee, e.g., Samson Goddy.

[1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Google_Code_In_2017
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.112
[3] https://github.com/sugarlabs/turtle-blocks-embedded-activity
[4] https://github.com/sugarlabs/music-blocks-embedded-activity
[5] https://github.com/sugarlabs/aslo-v3
[6] https://aslo3-devel.sugarlabs.org

regards.

-walter