Our proposal implies work on two very distinct areas.

One area is research, integration and documentation of our collaboration tools and best practices for a school social network.
Functionality for federated social networks based on Free Software is already in place, as demonstrated by elgg, noserub, DISo, OpenSocial and others. Our primary technical goal will be to integrate social networking capabilities into the XS collaboration server, that powers the Sugar learning environment. The simpler we make it, the lower the maintenance overhead, and more social the network can become.

The other area is community building and support. A social network's value increases exponentially in relation to its size, so we will foster it in its initial stages. Any ecosystem requires some time to stabilize and we will be monitoring feedback loops, cultural appropriation and scalability issues until we attain our final goal of making the network self-supporting. From then on, it is hoped it will continue to grow organically as more nodes are added to the global network.

In order to facilitate the emergence of learning communities among teachers, community learning workshops will be held, where teachers/implementors will be coached into implementing a node and clients by themselves, following available best practices. They will be encouraged to continue their collaboration online after each goes back to implement the solution in their own schools. Stipends will be offered for university students who want to volunteer and can later either replicate the workshops themselves or support the teachers using the social network itself.

Initial deployment is already planned in rural Peru for 200 computer laboratories and 2300 desktop computers running Ubuntu Linux and the Sugar learning environment. This will be our initial population, but we expect to grow very fast, and getting the software suite, best practices and documentation right will allow it to grow even faster.

We will encourage this collaboration across the education system by focusing on all aspects of it, using Sugar for in-class sharing, and the XS School Server for both school-wide collaboration and as a gateway into the global social network. The model will benefit a wide variety of school computing scenarios including the 750.000 XO laptops from OLPC already deployed, but also the more traditional computer laboratory model.

The server side will run the XS School Server distribution, which provides collaboration infrastructure for the Sugar environment. The introduction of decentralized social networking capabilities will be implemented using one of several options that are in evaluation. It will be based on popular standards and microformats like RSS, FOAF and OpenID.

We will also provide a distribution of Ubuntu Linux in spanish that installs Sugar by default to ease deployment.
Sugar is free software made to share, reflect and express, in synthesis it's a learning platform that children (in ages between 6 and 12) can use together to make and share works, imagine and create new content in a way that is naturally built into the user interface.

In truth, these communities of practice already exist. We want to use social networks to make them global. We will do this by lowering technical and cultural barriers for sharing knowledge so that the local culture incorporates and adapts the social network to its social practices. Its intent is to empower the locals into becoming digital citizens, while retaining their cultural identities.