OLPC-SF roundup and thanks!

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 on the Colbert Report

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.

Community Summit, Day 2

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.

OLPCSF schedule update, live IRC transcripts, notes online

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.

Nicaragua begins a new phase of implementation

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.

Thousands of students at the handout ceremony

Students at the handout ceremony

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.