Category Archives: Action

Ways to participate and get involved

MapSprint update!

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On Tuesday, Nick Doiron, Mark Battley, Adam Holt, Benaja (visiting from Haiti) worked on building our grassroot map. Nick, now a Carnegie Mellon Senior, is the genius energy who created the new interactive OLPC Map.

Thank you Mark for your organizational skills and creativity. And thank you Nick for patiently listening to our ideas and feedback. I am impressed that you are so freely able to integrate the many ideas of others into your growing project.

Q: What does this Map Represent?
Q: Who should use this map?
Q: How can I use this map if I am new to OLPC, if I interested in starting  a project, interested in donating,if I have a project or am a child in a project, and if I am an OLPC volunteer?
Tuesday evening we watched a wonderful film Premier “On the Line” and had a lively discussion with the filmmaker, Audubon Dougherty. The portrait of computer and Internet throughout rural Peru was heart-rendering and very thought provoking. The needs and obstacles are so great. So where are the XOs that have been sent to Peru.

Adam presented gifts to the winners of the fun and instructive OLPC Map/Sugar Trivia Contest…

Read more about the event on Nancie Severs’ blog.

Go Grovo!

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Grovo.com, a new online training site, is running a campaign to help generation XO around the world.  They are donating $1 for every person who signs up (the service is free) between now until December 31st.  They are also thinking about how to help new XO users learn to use the Internet in different ways.  On January 2, Grovo will announce the results on their blog.

Visit www.grovo.com/olpc to get started, and if you like what they’re doing, help spread the word!  There are a number of cool mentor/tutor projects in the works, and I expect to see a flowering of results and active mentor networks in the coming year.

Here’s some background on Grovo from one of their early case studies.  I can’t wait to see is a series of tutorials like this on how to use, say, the most popular sites in a very different online stting, like Nigeria or Korea (where I have a hard time figuring out the social and procedural norms).

Put your Favorite School Ever on the Map!

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The greatest project you’ve ever built. The most explosively dynamic volunteer you’ve ever met. The greatest school system you’ve ever heard of. Even your own mom’s Haiti school dream?

How should each appear on our community’s global map of 21st century EduTech innovators? How can you help them visually catalyze OLPC’s informal but global deployment community, from Kigali to Kathmandu?

Put YOUR Learning on the Map!

Put YOUR Learning on the Map!

If you cannot attend Boston’s olpcMAPmaking Sprint Dec 27-31 in person, and Audubon Dougherty’s premier Peru film presentation (preview), we invite you instead to inject your inspiration today — and watch your ideas grow — as our volunteer community sets itself to work, night and day showcasing OLPC/Sugar’s deployment doers’ greatest accomplishments worldwide.

So who’s on the front line of our planet’s DIY Foreign Aid Revolution today? Hint: http://olpcMAP.net was built entirely by volunteers, in the last 2 months, its community stories sparked but barely begun. Now they need your help bringing silent heroes’ creative outpourings to light — in and around rising 21st century schools everywhere, no matter how rich or poor — that you personally know are fighting to make a difference!

Whether you join these educational volunteers worldwide, seeding learning community networks one country at time, co-designing our Open Geospatial Infrastructure — or only have time to follow our grassroots pioneers’ mailing list, or just adding your your local insights into our suggestion box — we thank you profusely for your holiday generosity to our still-new-century’s kids emerging!

Caribbean travels

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UPDATE: Both made it back, after spending one of their weekends helping clean up after a fall storm. They managed to visit a number of schools and some of the groups that Waveplace and Haiti Partners are working with.

Mr. Holt and Tim Falconer are currently in Haiti, where they will be for the next ten days. Tim has been writing about their eventful travels, with more to come – see the waveplace blog for the illustrated story.

Community Summit, Day 2

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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.

Community Summit 2010 : October 23-24

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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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