MapSprint update!

On Tuesday, Nick Doiron, Mark Battley, Adam Holt, Benaja (visiting from Haiti) worked on building our grassroot map. Nick, now a Carnegie Mellon Senior, is the genius energy who created the new interactive OLPC Map.

Thank you Mark for your organizational skills and creativity. And thank you Nick for patiently listening to our ideas and feedback. I am impressed that you are so freely able to integrate the many ideas of others into your growing project.

Q: What does this Map Represent?
Q: Who should use this map?
Q: How can I use this map if I am new to OLPC, if I interested in starting  a project, interested in donating,if I have a project or am a child in a project, and if I am an OLPC volunteer?
Tuesday evening we watched a wonderful film Premier “On the Line” and had a lively discussion with the filmmaker, Audubon Dougherty. The portrait of computer and Internet throughout rural Peru was heart-rendering and very thought provoking. The needs and obstacles are so great. So where are the XOs that have been sent to Peru.

Adam presented gifts to the winners of the fun and instructive OLPC Map/Sugar Trivia Contest

Read more about the event on Nancie Severs’ blog.

Designing a new look for laptop.org

Our new site design, first mentioned earlier this year, is close to fruition. You can now see our alpha site online.

We are working on ways to better link the site, wiki, and blog together, and to aggregate and point to every site in the OLPC community. For now, you can add information about your own projects and websites, and links to them. We will be working on other visualizations of this data, and connecting our map of major deployments with the growing olpcmap network, over the coming month. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

An overview of stories

New OLPC site in the works

Our design partners have been developing a new design for the OLPC website, one that draws in contributions from our partner and chapter sites around the world. I saw the latest designs this week, and loved them!  We’ll have more updates about the site soon, once everyone’s back from the Realness Summit and we’ve heard from Mike Massey, our new photo maven.

The biggest change: we’re going to convert the homepage from a big logo to a series of full-screen images from deployments, with background details and links to more information. If you have any amazing photographs or stories you’d like to see featured on our homepage, please post a link to them.

Teasers:

An overview of stories
an OLPC world map

OLPC Greece supports 28 schools

OLPC in Greece has distributed 550 laptops to over 30 classes in each of 28 schools, and will soon be done with the deployment phase of their program.

In each participating class every student gets their own laptop, but no school has saturation.  I am curious as to how it will turn out.  Each school seems to have done its own internal training and planning, with a high ratio of participating teachers to students — many teachers are engaged in each school.  They all share a country-wide mailing list to discuss their work.  They have made a lovely visualization of their national network, linking proudly to the individual sites of each participating group.