One Laptop per Child

guest post by the inimitable Anne Gentle

Copy this book! We hope you will.  I am proud to say that through a collaboration with One Laptop per Child, Sugar Labs and FLOSS Manuals, a print and online manual about using the XO laptop and Sugar operating system is now available as via print-on-demand at Lulu.com.   Tom Brady checked it out when he was visiting the office last week and thought it was pretty neat.

You can order your own print copy for a modest price – someone walks off with one of mine every week, and I’m due to order some more.  Or you can read it on your XO laptop -  the PDF is always available for free and for remixing into your own works. Soon, the book will be for sale on Amazon as well.

Two sides of an elegant book

The OLPC Laptop Guide has a simple, clean cover design and the content inside was written by a community of professional writers, editors, open source experts, and OLPC staff. This book contains 240 pages of how-to information for your XO laptop and the operating system that kids love, Sugar. This book was written by a group of people in the unique wiki tool offered by FLOSS Manuals. Much of the content was written in a five-day collaborative BookSprint. In it you’ll find instructions for connecting with and caring for this unique little laptop. The neat thing is, once you’re done with a real book, you can pass it on to the next person who wants to learn about their XO. Get a book and pass it on.

Update: We are shipping G1G1 Internationally to 45 countries, through December 31st this year. See details on the late-November countries post.

We have spent the past two weeks preparing for the Give One, Get One fundraising campaign starting on Monday.  Last year’s donors (thank you!) were critical to launching projects in Rwanda, Haiti, Ethiopia, Oceania, Afghanistan^*, and Mongolia.  This year’s campaign will begin a new wave of OLPC projects.

The biggest difference this year is that G1G1′s donors are also going global — we are launching the campaign simultaneously in the US and Europe at 11am UTC (6am EST) on the 17th.  (UPDATE: Amazon.com information pages are up, and it is possible to put in a G1G1 request now, but the Give Only and other pages will not be up until later this afternoon.)

Donors in the US will be able to donate and Give a laptop through Laptop.org/xo.  The Get laptops going to recipients in the US will be fulfilled right away.  Donors outside the US will be able to donate through Amazon.co.uk, where G1G1 will cost £275 (currently just over 322 Euros) plus shipping.  The Get laptops for recipients outside the US will be fulfilled as soon as possible.  stay tuned to this blog for more details in the coming days.

Update: the Christmas round of shipments was sent out last week; everyone who donated by December 16th should have received their XO by now, unless we are still waiting on clearance to ship to their country [sorry, Japan!  Fumi, where are you when we need you?].  A final batch of machines will be sent out in January; the program is expected to end on December 31.

Update 2: donors in Australia, Hong Kong, and France are encouraged to donate through pages specifically set up for your country for a tax deduction.

The benefit of working with leading industry partners like Amazon to expand our reach is that our mission becomes clearer, letting OLPC focus on its real purpose: giving One Laptop per Child — at a global level.

The Boston-area OLPC crowd are organizing a launch party for G1G1 this Sunday night between 7pm and midnight in Harvard Square. The party will be at John Harvard’s Brewhouse.  If you’re in the area, it should be an amazing time — come say hello!

XOs welcome; the first 10 people to bring a G1G1 machine from last year will get a sweet G1G1 2009 t-shirt.  No word yet on whether any velociraptorz will be present.  I’ll update with more info and photos once I have them.

Eben has been working on a little Google Maps project — you may have seen the map of XOs around the world before, but it’s now bigger, better, and full of juicier data.

XOs around the world

So drop in and add yourself… in your favorite color/language combination.  And note what jabber server you use if you want to connect with others near you…

We all took a group photo yesterday afternoon, after a long week.  There was a camera crew idling in the office who were kind enough to oblige us.

That’s Delisile’s son in front holding up an XO and smiling… as charming as he is gorgeous.  Even Tom Brady was shy in his presence.

The Cambridge crew takes a break

Everyone has been getting a bit jumpy with the gray weather and long days, but this was fun. Henry is showing off the New York Times front page.  If you look closely, you can see that after Amy, our controller, came into the office this morning the market rallied a few hundred points.

More updates coming soon: with news about G1G1 around the world, launch parties this Sunday, and new videos, photos, and essays.  Send specific questions and requests our way!

Thanks to Joshua Gay of CK-12 for his help in crafting this posting!

Help us spread the joy of education to children all over the world by becoming a Social Media Warrior. At OLPC, we have the tools, the educational materials, and learning resources to help transform the lives of millions all over the world. To do so, we need thousands of volunteers to understand what we have and what we are capable of doing for the lives of children everywhere – and we need three of you to help us get the word out to them using the social networking and media sharing sites that pervade our lives.

Video Ninja

• We’ll hand you the keys to our YouTube, dailymotion, flickr-video, and myspace-tv accounts; work with our marketing team and branch out to other video networks at your discretion.
• Promote videos from media.laptop.org, olpc.tv, and other sources, including training resources for volunteers and staff in third-world deployments.
• Track down celebrity speakers for original source material and permission to use it.

Facebook Rockstar and Myspace Maven

• Work with our marketing team to grow our network of 1,346 Myspace friends or the 19,565 people signed up for our Facebook Cause.
• Reach out to help us find the eclectic types of short-term volunteers we need – the kinds that friends of friends of friends might know.
• Use messages to drive a critical mass of always-online, social-network-savvy members to major media outlets for news blasts.

Details after the fold.

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In preparation for our upcoming publicity blitz, we’ve launched a new website design today, with help from the Rubenstein Tech group.  A new site is overdue:  as we pass the first anniversary of mass production, almost 500,000 XOs have been distributed to teachers and children around the world, and tens of thousands are in the hands of developers, donors, and other contributors to the project.

The second year of the G1G1 program is lined up for success.  We have had 2500 new people join our announcements list in the past week.  In the office we have been working with great teams at Rubenstein, Amazon, Pentagram and Taxi to prepare for the surge of donated media, visitors, giving requests and video watchers expected over the coming weeks.

One Laptop per Child is launching its second Give One/Get One (G1G1) program on November 17, 2008.  Last year’s program supported the production of over 150,000 XOs.  This year the delivery of the laptops in the USA will be handled through Amazon.com.

The laptops will run the latest release of Sugar on a Linux-based Fedora Core operating system. (It will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports.) For answers to frequently asked questions, and for other XO giving programs, see XO giving and the G1G1 FAQ.  And for a bit of nostalgia, here is my favorite image from last year’s G1G1 program:

Thank-you videos and more below the fold,

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The office is still busy at midnight, with people coming and going; but it’s not what it once was when Bernie was the midnight DJ.   What I really need now is some 8-bit orchestras…

We are moving this blog to blog.laptop.org, and are also reserving blogs.laptop.org for pepole who want their own subdomains; get in touch with me if you have a blog you want to start here.   But we couldn’t wait until everything was in place to start taking down our thoughts and stories.

We could use links to existing stories, pointers to popular posts or press that need clarification, image and photo requests, and stories themselves.  Keep your pencils sharp and your wit dry, and stay tuned…

Hello, world!

OLPC is lucky to have an active independent news community.  Since we started posting regular updates in our weekly Community News digest, there has been active interest among other blogs since I joined OLPC in late 2006.  Likewise we have had community forums on olpcnews and elsewhere before forums.laptop.org were up and running.

The need for a public voice for OLPC has always been there — a place to announce changes and updates, break interesting news with certainty rather than rumor, and give OLPC staff and core volunteers who don’t blog themselves a place to share what they know.  So, with many changes and updates coming in the last months of 2008, we are finally setting up an official project blog.

My goal is for this to complement and support the great work on local and chapter blogs sharing olpc news in other languages.  If you have a story you want to share about OLPC, you may want to submit it to one of the community blogs in our blogroll.  If you have a story you want our project teams to write or elaborate on, or a new site to add to our blogroll, suggest it here.  I will gather all of the suggestions in a story ideas page, and we will work through them as soon as we can.

Yours in blogging, SJ