One Laptop per Child

Last weekend ran on into Monday for many attendees, due to late flights and the enormous hospitality of the Kleiders – June, Alex, Tanya, Isabella and Mike Gehl. Tremendous thanks are due to them and to everyone who made this such a joyous event!

Thanks also to the tireless design work and organization of Mike Lee and Elizabeth Barndollar, program coordination of Sameer Verma, Adam Holt and Hilary Naylor, social media and web support/registration fronts by Elizabeth Krumbach and Grant Bowman, and the local networking and support of Carol Ruth Silver and the SFSU student volunteer team of Alexander Mock, Abhi Pendyal, Brittany Dea, Charles Fang, Christian Pascual, Dan Sanchez, Gerard Enriquez, Hue La, Jay Cai, Lana Seto, Navi Thach , Neeraj Chand, Nina Makalinaw, Paul Mak, Russell Lee, and Simon Pan.

Live documentation of the event was possible thanks to tireless video work, moderation and transcription of Ben Sheldon, Nina Stawski, and others; and gifts and travel were supported by dozens of individuals, attendees (through their registration fees — thank you!) and by OLPC.

And finally, behind the scenes thank you to Yuliana Diestel and Richard Ho at the SFSU Downtown Center for managing logistics and Dean Nancy Hayes of the College of Business at SFSU for hosting us, and to Peter Brantley at the Internet Archive for allowing ten of us to join the excellent Books in Browsers event.

Nicholas was on the set of the Colbert Report yesterday taping an interview with Stephen Colbert, which is now online. He reports the interview was tremendous fun, and it shows — this is one of the best interviews about OLPC in months. In the process he and Matt met the Colbert Crew of 80 and a supportive audience. (They had to cut a minute of the interview for time, but robots make a surprise appearance.)

Some Colbert Nation and reddit citizens have already gotten in touch with us to see how they can help raise awareness and engagement. Stephen, thank you for the interest, and the excellent vibe.

Bastien recently posted a video of the evolution of the code for Sugar’s Write activity. It’s a lovely visualization, and worth a look.

We have had an incredible 1.5 days thus far at the OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2010. Mayor Gavin Newsom declared October 23, 2010 as One Laptop per Child Day in San Francisco!

There are some lovely photos online from the events and sessions, thanks to Mike Lee and
TuxWingsGroup.

You can join us online today at 11:30AM and 13:45pm Pacific online with our live ustream video stream, and the notes from all sessions are now online on the wiki schedule.

Today’s event has just kicked off and is already amazing. Everyone in the room is somewhat in awe of everyone else, since each person here has done something that others are familiar with and wish they could be doing as well.

The full schedule for today’s event is up and updated on the wiki. We are linking from the scheduel above to IRC transcript summaries/video/photos, and welcome help cleaning them up!

Live transcripts for the three parallel sessions are on irc.freenode.net in #olpc-553, #olpc-554 and #olpc-555 (and in #olpc-553 for the plenaries)
If you don’t have an IRC client, you can use our webchat client. This will drop you into the “olpc-help” channel — just ask people how to connect to the channel you are interested in.

Earlier this week, the municipality of Bluefields in Northeast Nicaragua received 7,500 XOs from the Fundación Zamora Terán. These were distributed to all primary teachers and children in the rural community, which is a mix of Miskito, Mestizo, Rama, Garifona, and Creole families.

Roberto and MaryJo Zamora, the husband and wife owners of LAFISE-BanCentro bank, founded the Zamora-Teran Foundation last year to train teachers and students involved in the OLPC projects in the country, and to distribute and manage the logistics and telecommunication infrastructure of the project. This is an extraordinary example of a private sector, non-profit entity helping to motivate their country by example, in launching a project like this — and we are lucky to be working with such a skilled and dedicated regional partner.

This marks the first regional saturation in the country, in an already remarkable community — they already have a thriving Bluefields forum online covering everything from art to civic development. Nicaragua may well become the next educational success story in Latin America.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared tomorrow, October 23, “One Laptop per Child Day” in San Francisco, in recognition of OLPC’s service to communities around the world — and in honor of the upcoming community summit. Special thanks are due to Carol Ruth Silver and Sameer Verma for their work with the city to make this, and the weekend’s events, possible.

San Francisco has been a nexus of creative energy and support for the olpc movement since the early days of the project, when fuseproject took on our industrial design. It’s fitting that the city is hosting the international summit this weekend, and an honor to have the mayor name a day after the project — or really, if you read the text of the proclamation (and I woinder: who writes these things?), naming one after our global network. Thank you to everyone who is helping to carry the message of universal education and connectivity forward, around the world.

If you are coming to the summit this weekend, please remember to register online — we have about a dozen spaces left.

And don’t forget: we are opening with a reception tonight at 5pm. I look forward to seeing everyone soon!

Sameer Verma and OLPC-SF are putting the finishing touches on what’s going to be an amazing community event at SFSU this weekend — an international Community Summit for OLPC hackers, implementers, and researchers from dozens of countries and projects. We’ll kick off with an evening party tonight and then with a full agenda from tomorrow morning through Sunday night.

Mike Lee, Andreas Gros, Tim Falconer, Tabitha Roder, Marina Zdobnova and others have been taking part in the Books in Browsers event, so I can confirm that people from a few different countries have already arrived. And we will have some nice surprises for attendees tonight and tomorrow morning… so please join us early!

I’m at the Open Content Alliance‘s annual meeting, this year about Books in Browsers, hosted at the Internet Archive in SF. It’s an encouraging gathering, with a lot of the technical and social implementations lining up as people give their short presentations.

I spoke yesterday about the olpc use case of rural and offline schools (you can find my slides online on the OLPC wiki), where bookreaders and the books they can find are often all that students have in the way of a regional library. Others in the audience added that there is also often no historical division between receiving stories and creating your own, or a tradition of ‘received knowledge’ that publishers have decided is worth distributing.

A few wonderful bits of news: the Internet Archive’s bookreader, which is one of the best browser-based readers around, now works with touchscreen input (NTS: get them a 1.75 model once they’re available!; some of their sliders are too small/cexercise/>lose to the screen edges for the XO bezel). Mary Lou brought a new Pixel Qi screen with her from Taiwan (she and John will both be @ SFSU tomorrow). And a lot of people in attendance (including many people who are building the next gen of bookreader) are working on one of the core ideas of modern collaboration — that everyone is both reader and author at different times.

My favorite quote from the event so far: “Before the writer was ‘author’, before the invention of [literary] ‘genius’, artists simply transmitted culture that preexisted: spongs, dances, text, stories, poems that didn’t ‘belong’ to anyone. And their skill was the skill to transmit, not of invention, and attributable to a [muse], not to personal genius.”

I hope to see some of you tonight at 5pm at the opening party for the community summit!

Nkubito Bakuramutsa, OLPC project coordinator at the Rwandan Education Ministry, talked to the Rwanda New Times this week about the first 10,000 students and teachers who had received laptops through the country’s OLPC program. Rwanda is on track to distribute XOs to 50,000 students by the end of the year, with another 50,000 following soon after.

The national deployment team recently finished setting up their software build, and is now flashing 2,000 XOs a day. This is a good milestone for the team — learning how to rebuild all parts of the system on their own is important, and as Zehra can attest the first time you get a NANDBlast production line up and running is memorable.

The schools are including materials from OLPC, Sugar Labs, India’s Azim Premji Foundation, the National Curriculum Development Centre, and the Rwanda Education Commons, with customization help from Microsoft and Rwanda’s Green Hills Academy network of schools.

A child’s path to becoming a strong and self-determined learner can be difficult in even the best conditions.  Now, imagine you are a child trying to read after soldiers have interrogated your teacher, again.  Imagine you are a child who just lost a home, school, and half your friends in the instant of a massive flood. Families coping with emergencies and war consider education as life saving as water, food, shelter, and medical supplies. Education builds back community, gives children tools to cope, and provides a link to a future beyond their current stresses.

This week One Laptop per Child took part as a new partner in the bi-annual meeting of the Education Cluster Working Group, a UNICEF and Save the Children led initiative for Education in Emergencies born out of the EFI. New friends in the Cluster shared their education relief efforts in Haiti, Pakistan, occupied Palestinian territories, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past two years.

Stay tuned for news of OLPC’s input to the Cluster on open-source material for learning, protecting education from attack, and community participation for education in emergencies. After all, the XO was built to provide learning opportunities for children in the most remote and difficult circumstances.

Paraguay’s national deployment, run by Paraguay Educa, has been developing its own build of a Sugar operating system for its students, with help from Sugarlabs. They are calling it Dextrose. The newly-formed Activity Central group, a Sugar-development consultancy, is helping with this work, and supporting some local developers in Paraguay.

Dextrose is a spin of the core Sugar build that will focus on teacher tools and content in Spanish.
While initially developed with feedback from classrooms in Paraguay, this will hopefully become a platform that other deployments in Latin America can use. While Peru has been shy about frequent software upgrades, preferring to have something stable for years at a time, Uruguay and other smaller deployments are good candidates to start using Dextrose as well.

This week OLPC hosted the very first Arabic Chat to support our projects in the Middle East! The chat brought together our partners in the West Bank and Gaza for the first time to share their experiences with other members from the global OLPC community.

After introductions, the discussion was kicked off around the general usability benefits of the XO. An OLPC partner took to the podium to share their extensive field experiences and the positive outcomes of deploying the XO in Gaza including: training of more than 230 teachers and 2200 students in UNRWA schools, steps to create and implement new educational games specifically designed for the Palestinian platform.

One idea behind the Arabic Forum and these online chat sessions is to continue to facilitate the communication between OLPC partners and supporters. We managed to accomplish that during the chat, thank you for all those who signed in.

We hope more of you will join the Forum and stay tuned for future chats!

Our movement continues on thin budgets and a go-getter attitude. Some of it is ego, some reputation, but a lot of it is the drive to make a difference. Every time I listen to “Imagine” (…imagine there’s no countries…) I wonder – if you erase those lines in the sand, all those problems around the world indeed become yours as well. So should the solutions. Help solve it, and things will get better for everyone. “…and the world will live as one“.

I have had the good fortune of working with a team of learning/curriculum experts at the University of the West Indies, and 115 XOs that we have acquired. We are working with other deployments to seed far greater things for OLPC in Jamaica, with our community learning portfolio at the ready. I am fortunate that my colleagues in Jamaica are go-getters, who have plugged away since 2007 to make this a reality.

Remember the Realness summit — May’s event in the US Virgin Islands, where dozens of volunteers flew in to exchange notes, talk turkey, compile failures, and build rigorous community infrastructure? In this tradition, we are hosting OLPC’s biggest ever grassroots/community summit in three weeks.

Thanks are due to our amazing set of volunteers and our hosts (and my employer), San Francisco State’s College of Business.

Community Summit 2010 will bring together over 100 community members from around the world, to share the enthusiasm of grassroots OLPC deployments on every continent (We’re still working on Antarctica. Anyone want to start a project with E-Base?), and to discuss ways to connect successful pilots to improve long-term sustainability.

Who’s coming? Take a look. Leading OLPC communities worldwide into spare parts logistics (iLoveMyXO.com), learning content (tinygames), direct Sugar/Gnome School Server applicability, highly progressive health activities, and even a peripherals/solar/energy innovation team (XOdock).

Individuals such as reactivated Daniel Drake, who literally paved the way for some of the world’s largest OLPC deployments, collecting airfare donations in $10 chunks. And Tabitha Roder, who fostered OLPC’s testing for years with the force of her personality in cafes across New Zealand.

Additionally, we have preliminary RSVP’s from Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Philippines, The Gambia, Rwanda, Sao Tome & Principe, France, UK, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, Birmingham and beyond.
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I’ve lost count of how many times the demise and resurrection of OLPC and Sugar have been proclaimed and celebrated. What makes these projects tick?  Grow?  I ask myself this question whenever I start feeling burned out, wondering why I remain attached to the project and this green machine.

My own journey with OLPC, Sugar and all things related, has been underway for years. I’m a techie at heart, a “thinly-disguised” business school professor, teaching IT strategy and researching business models and consumer behavior. Every once in a while, I’ll sit down and compile a kernel, or run a packet sniffer.  (What can I say? It’s instant gratification and a lot more fun

I think of the tech as the supply side of my interest: The XO makes for a great technology platform. The mesh (whether 802.11s or ad-hoc), suspend with the screen lit, robustness, low power, etc. is all very cool. Cool enough for a grown man to walk around with a funny-looking green machine slung around his shoulder.  The software stack too is amazing, flexible, free. The content is rich. Wikipedia in a box? Awesome! The tech definitely keeps me tethered.

Then there’s the demand side: a part of my family lives in rural India, in Bhagmalpur. A village where I have seen the simple life. Clean air, good food, quiet living. Its also stricken with poverty, sanitation issues, water shortages, and seriously untapped ingenuity.

As a kid, I used to hang around Maggu, while he milked a water buffalo, or Bahadur, while he made gold jewelry on a block of coal. Today I wonder what Maggu would do if he could learn about the rest of the world and its dairy achievements. How Bahadur’s family could save the lost art of rural goldsmiths. Would they benefit from a peek into that Wikipedia in a box? You bet. In my mind, I can savor the possibilities of the supply, and imagine what it can do for the demand. I speak with my friend Javier Cardona about IEEE 802.11s, with Maggu on my mind. These worlds must meet.

Finally, there’s the catalyst: my daughter Mira, now age five. She could open the XO, power it on, and turn it around into tablet mode when she was two. At three, she could play Implode on the XO with a finesse that amazed me. Children are like sponges; they soak up everything, and have incredibly simple solutions in their heads.  I cherish Mira’s curiosity and ingenuity, and she has been my catalyst for inspiration.

So that is my supply, my demand, and my catalyst. My story and my guide.

Mira hard at work

Every volunteer has her own story. Many come and go, some stay, but all leave a mark on the overall process. They all help us steer projects in new and meaningful ways. For instance, a little over two years ago in Austin the XO manual was written by volunteers to pave the way for a new kind of global user.  Sugar hackers and tech writers of all flavors funded their own way to Austin, to gather and create a resource that is used everywhere today.

A year later, volunteers ganged up in Washington, DC (again on their own dime) to create 30+ OLPC community deployment success stories, compiled into the “Class Acts” repository of tips & tricks.  I’ve dipped into this pool myself, asking my students to convert some of these into one-pagers. If you need a handout for a neighbor or school principal, grab this and print it!

And now we’re preparing for a larger community event, with volunteers from all parts of the movement and from around the world, at the OLPCSF Community Summit. Stay tuned for details and a summit update tomorrow.

Sameer Verma is the chief organizer of the OLPC SF community. He is also Associate Professor of Information Systems in the College of Business at San Francisco State University.

OLPC Mongolia banner, from laptop.gov.mn

OLPC Mongolia’s national website has been steadily adding new information about their program, and their site looks beautiful. I need to get a proper translation of their blog, which often goes into extreme detail.

They have charming walkthroughs for every core activity (here’s WikipediaEN and Speak. And they love to share data… sometimes in 3D.

Australia, Oceania, Nepal and Canada are leading the way in terms of detailed maps of the schools involved in pilots; it would be great to see what artistic style Mongolia adds to that meme.