The Boston-area OLPC crowd are organizing a launch party for G1G1 this Sunday night between 7pm and midnight in Harvard Square. The party will be at John Harvard’s Brewhouse. If you’re in the area, it should be an amazing time — come say hello!
XOs welcome; the first 10 people to bring a G1G1 machine from last year will get a sweet G1G1 2009 t-shirt. No word yet on whether any velociraptorz will be present. I’ll update with more info and photos once I have them.
Eben has been working on a little Google Maps project — you may have seen the map of XOs around the world before, but it’s now bigger, better, and full of juicier data.
XOs around the world
So drop in and add yourself… in your favorite color/language combination. And note what jabber server you use if you want to connect with others near you…
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
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!
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
Facebook Rockstar and Myspace Maven
Details after the fold.
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.
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:
Thank-you videos and more below the fold,