Category: OLPC

Now that’s a great smile…

We all took a group photo yesterday afternoon, after a long week.  There was a camera crew idling in the office who were kind enough to oblige us.

That’s Delisile’s son in front holding up an XO and smiling… as charming as he is gorgeous.  Even Tom Brady was shy in his presence.

The Cambridge crew takes a break
The Cambridge crew takes a break

Everyone has been getting a bit jumpy with the gray weather and long days, but this was fun. Henry is showing off the New York Times front page.  If you look closely, you can see that after Amy, our controller, came into the office this morning the market rallied a few hundred points.

More updates coming soon: with news about G1G1 around the world, launch parties this Sunday, and new videos, photos, and essays.  Send specific questions and requests our way!

Recruiting: OLPC Social Media Warriors

Thanks to Joshua Gay of CK-12 for his help in crafting this posting!

Help us spread the joy of education to children all over the world by becoming a Social Media Warrior. At OLPC, we have the tools, the educational materials, and learning resources to help transform the lives of millions all over the world. To do so, we need thousands of volunteers to understand what we have and what we are capable of doing for the lives of children everywhere – and we need three of you to help us get the word out to them using the social networking and media sharing sites that pervade our lives.

Video Ninja

  • We’ll hand you the keys to our YouTube, dailymotion, flickr-video, and myspace-tv accounts; work with our marketing team and branch out to other video networks at your discretion.
  • Promote videos from media.laptop.org, olpc.tv, and other sources, including training resources for volunteers and staff in third-world deployments.
  • Track down celebrity speakers for original source material and permission to use it.

Facebook Rockstar and Myspace Maven

Details after the fold.

Continue reading Recruiting: OLPC Social Media Warriors

OLPC Website redesign : focusing on education

In preparation for our upcoming publicity blitz, we’ve launched a new website design today, with help from the Rubenstein Tech group.  A new site is overdue:  as we pass the first anniversary of mass production, almost 500,000 XOs have been distributed to teachers and children around the world, and tens of thousands are in the hands of developers, donors, and other contributors to the project.

The second year of the G1G1 program is lined up for success.  We have had 2500 new people join our announcements list in the past week.  In the office we have been working with great teams at Rubenstein, Amazon, Pentagram and Taxi to prepare for the surge of donated media, visitors, giving requests and video watchers expected over the coming weeks.

The goal of the site redesign is to bring renewed attention to the educational aspect of OLPC’s mission. It’s an education project, not a laptop project; the new design echoes this sentiment, looking beyond the technology to focus on how it is changing the lives of the children it benefits.
The new site is being soft launched this weekend, and can be seen now at laptop.org.  Let us know what you think.

Give a laptop, change the world : 2008 edition

One Laptop per Child is launching its second Give One/Get One (G1G1) program on November 17, 2008.  Last year’s program supported the production of over 150,000 XOs.  This year the delivery of the laptops in the USA will be handled through Amazon.com.

The laptops will run the latest release of Sugar on a Linux-based Fedora Core operating system. (It will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports.) For answers to frequently asked questions, and for other XO giving programs, see XO giving and the G1G1 FAQ.  And for a bit of nostalgia, here is my favorite image from last year’s G1G1 program:

My Other Laptop Is In Rwanda

Thank-you videos and more below the fold,

Continue reading Give a laptop, change the world : 2008 edition

Welcome to the new OLPC blog

We are moving this blog to blog.laptop.org, and are also reserving blogs.laptop.org for pepole who want their own subdomains; get in touch with me if you have a blog you want to start here.   But we couldn’t wait until everything was in place to start taking down our thoughts and stories.

We could use links to existing stories, pointers to popular posts or press that need clarification, image and photo requests, and stories themselves.  Keep your pencils sharp and your wit dry, and stay tuned…