Australia’s toughest Linux deployment: a plan for 300,000 XOs

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Sridhar Dhanapalan is giving a talk next week about OLPC Australia, pitching it as “Australia’s toughest Linux deployment“.  It certainly is that.  He notes their aim to reach each of the 300,000 children and teachers in remote parts of Australia, over the next three years.

From his abstract:

OLPC Aus­tralia aims to cre­ate a sus­tain­able and com­pre­hens­ive pro­gramme to enhance oppor­tun­it­ies for every child in remote Aus­tralia… by 2014.

[T]he most remote areas of the con­tin­ent are typ­ic­ally not eco­nom­ic­ally viable for a busi­ness to ser­vice, hence the need for a not-for-profit in the space. 

This talk will out­line how OLPC Aus­tralia has developed a solu­tion to suit Aus­tralian scen­arios. Com­par­is­ons and con­trasts will be made with other “com­puters in schools” pro­grammes, OLPC deploy­ments around the world and cor­por­ate IT projects.

By pro­mot­ing flex­ib­il­ity and ease of use, the pro­gramme can achieve sus­tain­ab­il­ity by enabling man­age­ment at the grass-roots level. The XO laptops them­selves are… repair­able in the field, with min­imal skill required. Train­ing is con­duc­ted online, and an online com­munity allows par­ti­cipants nation­wide to share resources.

Key to the ongo­ing suc­cess of the pro­gramme is act­ive engage­ment with all stake­hold­ers, and a recog­ni­tion of the total cost of own­er­ship over a five-year life cycle.

 

Updates from OLPC Greece: multimedia, programming, and plans

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Since 2009, OLPC Greece has provided one laptop per child in 35 classes and groups around the country.  580 XOs in all, with the inolvement of many teachers.  They have kept us updated via our wiki and regular emails, and shared some interesting work from their students.

My favorite post is from the 3rd graders at the Sminthi School —  they made large tiles of stencil art, rearranged it on a school wall, and turned it into stop-motion animations with Scratch (video).   Their professors Psychogios, Rigas, and Aspioti, brought this work into with their math, informatics, and art classes.

Recently the OLPC Greece team published a short summary of their work from the first two years, and their goals for the coming year.  They note the need for local hardware labs, software updates, and technical support.  You can follow their work, in Greek, on the public mailing list for the pilot.  (An excellent practice!)

Students and teachers work on a stencil in Sminthi

Students and teachers work on a stencil in Sminthi

 

 

Map and Activity news from Haiti

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Update: The US Embassy recently visited Ecole Shalom and its OLPC deployment, with a donation of creole books, and blogged about it in English and French.

Nick Doiron recently travelled to Petit-Goave, Haiti,  continuing to map the country there via OpenStreetMap.

He has also been hacking on activities for the OLPC schools there, most recently the Bridge activity originally from Daniel Drake and Nirav Patel — adding a plugin which lets you incorporate a solar sensor, which lets sunlight grow giant flowers that push up your bridge!

If you think this sounds like a daydream morphed into activity form, you’re absolutely right.  (see screenshots below).

Nick: if you’re looking at games to add solar sensing to, then Rollcats is an obvious choice.  The Sun is your cheerleader!

 

Thanks for making the San Francisco summit great

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I join the SF summit organizers in thanking everyone who helped make this year’s event possible, including the amazing attendees, Mayor Lee and SFSU graduate program director Aaron Anderson.  Special thanks to Sameer for pulling it all together, and to the attendees from all corners of the globe.  It is nice to see “One Laptop per Child Day” becoming a tradition in the city.

Please post your favorite photos or recollections of the summit and from your travels home; we hope to hear from you all soon.

 

Guyana launches One Laptop per Family program with 1000 netbooks

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President Jagdeo of Guyana has launched an One Laptop per Family initiative “to develop the country’s ICT sector”.  The program has been in planning since last year, with the laptops provided by Chinese manufacturer Haier.  5000 have already arrived in Guyana, with plans for 22,000 more later this year.  Their goal is to reach 90,000 families within two years.

Deployment of the first 1000 laptops began this week — as this is election season, most public discussion has been around whether it is simply an effort to buy votes by a the incumbent party (the PPP).

There is commentary at the Stabroek News.  A selection:

“This is a good initiative but it will not save the PPP from getting the boot in this election.”

“Its not like they are doing the people a favour, this is what they’re suppose to do for the citizens.  Do they think they’ll get credit for it?”

“An independent audit into the distribution of these laptops will show a favor towards so called “rural” residents.”

“Hope they will also get free Internet access, and blog on this site.”

 

Pakistan’s Open Source Resource Centers celebrate their students

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Pakistan has a government initiative to support and promote the use of open source tools — an “Open Source Resource Center” program, supported by the Pakistan Software Expert Board.   13 of their students recently became Red Hat-certified technicians and engineers, and they have helped work on Sugar and related localizations.

They are running a small PR campaign to celebrate their work — representing Pakistan’s open source community at international events, and training over 8000 people who have come to a center for help or study.    Kudos to the OSRC teams – I expect we will hear more from them soon!