Category Archives: Community

OLPCSF schedule update, live IRC transcripts, notes online

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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.

San Francisco declares October 23 “One Laptop per Child Day”

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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!

Reminder: OLPC Community Summit this weekend @ SFSU

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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!

Books in Browsers @ the Internet Archive

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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/close 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!

Dextrose released for the XO

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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.

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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