Geeks Without Frontiers, working with Cozybit’s Javier Cardona, recently released the latest version of their open source village-scale wifi tech, o11s. This is solid work that deserves more visibility.
Also covered by ostatic.
Geeks Without Frontiers, working with Cozybit’s Javier Cardona, recently released the latest version of their open source village-scale wifi tech, o11s. This is solid work that deserves more visibility.
Also covered by ostatic.
OLPC is working in 9 schools and 5 cities in Afghanistan. Many of the schools have some limited Internet connectivity at home, but most families still don’t have Internet (though they may get GPRS coverage if they have access to a cell phone) in their neighborhoods or home compounds.
In Jalalabad, this is changing in part thanks to a mesh network run by FabLab Jalalabad. Through their FabFi network, many children with XOs and their families have access to the Internet (and Wikipedia) for the first time. Fast Company wrote up a good story on this, following the New York Times’s lead last Sunday (commentary).
Similar FabLabs with mesh networks have sprung up elsewhere, most notably in Kenya. I hope to see them spread more widely in Africa and Asia – it seems like a robust and scalable model for engaging communities in maintaining their own networks.
cscott just rejoined our team from distant lands, to much rejoicing. His first blog post covers his work this month to explore of software development paths for the XO-3. Welcome back!
Last Monday I rejoined One Laptop Per Child as Director, New Technologies. My mandate is hardware and software for the XO-3, OLPC’s upcoming ARM-based tablet computer for education in the developing world. The new machine should be lower cost, lower power, more indestructible, more powerful, and potentially more expandable than ever. There are about two million machines in the XO-1 family (XO-1, XO-1.5) in the hands of kids today. The XO-3 will build upon this impressive foundation to reach further into the poorest and least-connected regions of the world.
I will kick-off my work with a series of four week-long sprints between now and eduJAM Uruguay to investigate possible directions for the educational software stack on the XO-3 tablet. On the XO-1 machines, OLPC ships Sugar, an impressive collection of educational software developed by Sugar Labs. How can we keep the best of Sugar while yanking the UI forward into a touch-friendly tablet world?
The following week is Conozco Uruguay and the Uruguay EduJAM — where I’ll present progress on these exploratory projects and discuss the path ahead with the OLPC and Sugar communities. A week is not enough time to finish any of these projects! But the focused effort should help to identify the promise, roadblocks, and challenges in each path, which will help us plan the future.
Todd Kelsey, long time OLPC volunteer who has helped with documentation and translation projects in the past, has a mesh proposal in to the Knight News Challenge. He writes of his proposal:
Mesh News is an entry on the Knight News Challenge, which has received a request for a full proposal. As of 12:30pm EST on 11-20, the 2000 entries have been narrowed down to around 350, and Mesh news is in 8th place in terms of overall number of views, and dropped from 3rd to 5th place in terms of “ratings”. If it does make it past the full proposal stage to the “final 50”, and then to the “final 20”, I think it could help a few kids out in various parts, provide a bit of employment, and help to get some additional publicity for OLPC. Go G1G1!!!