Category: OLPC

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…

Birth of a blog

Hello, world!

OLPC is lucky to have an active independent news community.  Since we started posting regular updates in our weekly Community News digest, there has been active interest among other blogs since I joined OLPC in late 2006.  Likewise we have had community forums on olpcnews and elsewhere before forums.laptop.org were up and running.

The need for a public voice for OLPC has always been there — a place to announce changes and updates, break interesting news with certainty rather than rumor, and give OLPC staff and core volunteers who don’t blog themselves a place to share what they know.  So, with many changes and updates coming in the last months of 2008, we are finally setting up an official project blog.

My goal is for this to complement and support the great work on local and chapter blogs sharing olpc news in other languages.  If you have a story you want to share about OLPC, you may want to submit it to one of the community blogs in our blogroll.  If you have a story you want our project teams to write or elaborate on, or a new site to add to our blogroll, suggest it here.  I will gather all of the suggestions in a story ideas page, and we will work through them as soon as we can.

Yours in blogging, SJ