OLPC is holding a small gathering in Jordan this week, and preparing to donate 5,000 XOs to the United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA) to give to refugee children in the Gaza strip. UNWRA operates over 800 schools for Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Labanon, Gaza and the West Bank.
I have been looking forward to our progress with refugee camps for a long time. I hope this is only the first.
Activity and collection designers have gotten a lot of attention in recent days. Some of the heated discussions at FUDCon targeted the rpm v. xo debate — concluding among other things that content bundles and installation for non-technical users are regularly neglected by packaging systems (as root access is required for a lot of package work).
Numerous related projects were mentioned [CPAN, Ruby Gems, autopkg, Firefox extensions], and Michael Stone and C. Scott Ananian both got their licks in. At the same time, a recent discussion about “making activity designers happy” brought up other ways to simplify making and publishing activity bundles.
What are your own bundle stories? Have you plumbed the depths of Activities/All and come up wanting? Does the Software Updater do it for you?
… Justin.tv, that is. See us at http://justin.tv/xocamp . You can also call in to our conference line: 866-213-2185 (code 1671650#)
We’re currently wrapping up the first day, talking about the latest sweet changes to Turtle Art and a Portfolio. Earlier we had a lot of discussions about requirements from deployments, future roadmaps; and reports from the weekend’s FUDCon and Sugar Labs and Codex Mag meetings.
Update: We’ve started with Day 2; check the wiki schedule for timing updates.
Read more details, and find slides, images, and transcribed Q&A on the OLPC conference wiki page.
XO enthusiasts from around the world (including canada, new zealand, italy, lithuania, denmark and texas) gathering in Cambridge for the second XOCamp this week.
Contribute or just listen in. We will be setting up streaming and a conference line for those interested.
Ed Cherlin is a volunteer and community member.
There is a fairly long and rambling thread on Slashdot starting from the recent announcement from OLPC. That discussion contains a lot of uninformed naysaying, but there are also some good posts. I just spent some time there answering questions and correcting misinformation. Since most of the naysaying on Slashdot (the polite parts, anyway) is pretty much the same as what you read in the respectable business press, I thought it worthwhile to review some of these opinions, correct confusions, and highlight the good parts.
Now you may wonder why we aren’t hearing any comments on the layoffs. Well, that’s Slashdot. I have to take the comments as they come. This is what people are talking about.  OLPC is dead, according to the naysayers, killed by some combination of Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Arrogance & elitism, scale, or not selling to the first world.
Greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain put it. Curiously, none of the commentators said, “All of the above.” Each has a favorite theory, and is sticking to it. This smacks of The Blind Men and The Elephant, except in this case without the elephant.
OLPC the organization has its share of problems. OLPC “It’s an education project” is in great shape, from my point of view, and OLPC XO the product has had a fantastic launch year, in spite of hardware and software issues, high expectations, and so on. How many new computer models get a million orders in the first year? How many non-profits have ever received a million orders for a computer? But let’s take these one at a time.
A lot of other blogs are linking here, and a lot of articles are linking to the wiki or recent post. A selection: ipodindia, dualiko, the-informer.info, ajun.org, inteeer gadgets, freegadgetnews, spotgadgets, gps-navigation, wiredpen, ontorebd.
Internationally : e-day.it and pasteris.it, and a few German-language posts
Yama posted one of his inimitable essays, pony and all, on the blog that everyone can edit.  John Paczkowski wins the prize for the catchiest post.
Comment here if you want your own thoughts added to this list. I’ve also seen a few good threads for pulling out more ‘best of OLPC commentary’ quotes… some of them with helpful reflections. Those are worth listing, as well.