Not such a silly idea .. if you put in place an informal feedback and
community mechanism that will not gum up your current operational mechanism.
Perhaps an informal group called Polysaccharide: Linking the friends of
sugar
I had some interest at the QSITE conference in Brisbane where I had the
opportunity to showcase some of the work by Sugar on a Stick. There was
considerable interest from one teacher who was demonstrating his experiments
with Linux on a stick. He was interested in the thought of engaging his
young students with a wider development community that could better
understand roadmaps and software is developed and how he could use this to
introduce them to a wider world of testing and submitting feature requests.
regards Roland
2009/10/5 Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com
Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-)
It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for
marketing to children, especially as prescriptors (Papa, I want Sugar
Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because
there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.) For this reason,
cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course,
sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However,
companies are very leery of any association which could impact their
brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work.
Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of
cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of
Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any
GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the
marketshare problem.
What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand.
Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market,
taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might
be willing to give the space away.
However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be
limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium
quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet;
bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio /
fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be
tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional
cereals...
Sean
On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if
they think it will help them to sell more cereal. What greater way to
make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar? The bootable DVD could
include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia.
I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that
it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we
are
not far, given the motivation. The trickier thing is to convince a
cereal
distributor of the idea.
I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
--Ben
P.S. We might have to employ a different branding if Sugar is a
problematic name in this context.
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Roland Gesthuizen - ICT Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change
the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has. --Margaret Mead
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